“Here on the coast of Normandy, at this hour of the morning, I needed no one. The very gulls’ presence bothered me: I drove them off with stones. And hearing their supernatural shrieks, I realized that that was just what I wanted, that only the Sinister could soothe me, and that it was for such a confrontation that I had got up before dawn.”

“Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.”

“What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone. The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else’s, not even a saint’s. I cannot bear your bothering about my salvation. If I apprehend salvation and flee it, your prayers are merely an indiscretion. Invest them elsewhere; in any case, we do not serve the same gods. If mine are impotent, there is every reason to believe yours are no less so. Even assuming they are as you imagine them, they would still lack the power to cure me of a horror older than my memory.”

“For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.”

“I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions—only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. … This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.”

“I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass—which is better than trying to fill them.”

“Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.”