“Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die.”

“Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.”

“Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.”

“The last time I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the chateau, at my brother’s wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn’t recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn’t seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother’s choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn’t have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn’t regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer.”

“You were said to have died of suffering. But there was notas much sadness in you as there is now in those whoremember you. You died because you searched forhappiness at the risk of finding the void.”

“I don’t write in the morning, my brain isn’t up to it yet, I don’t write in the afternoon, I’m too sad, I write from five o’clock on, I need to have been awake a long time, my body relaxed from a day’s fatigue.”

“You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.Your suicide was scandalously beautiful…You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.”