“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”

“All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

“But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.”

“And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.”

“I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.”

“Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.”

“Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.”