“I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?”

“Gaudium is what I dream of: to enjoy a lifelong pleasure. But being unable to accede to Gaudium, from which I am separated by a thousand obstacles, I dream of falling back on Laetitia: if I could manage to confine myself to the lively pleasures the other affords me, without contaminating them, mortifying them by the anxiety which serves as their hinge? If I could take an anthological view of the amorous relation? If I were to understand, initially, that a great preoccupation does not include moments of pure pleasure, and then, if I managed systematically to forget the zones of alarm which separate these moments of pleasure? If I could be dazed, inconsistent?”

“Me miserable! Which way shall I flyInfinite wrath and infinite despair?Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;And in the lowest deep a lower deep,Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

“There is an attraction for you which does not exist for me, since I do not feel any pleasure. You see, we are making a bargain. You give me a dream, I give you joy. But all this is not love.”

“Ben made me laugh. I was attracted to his attraction for me: the way he smiled for instance, whenever he saw me, that goofy kind of grin that hijacks the face of the helplessly smitten.”

“O Allah, You know me better than I know myself, and I know myself better than these people who praise me. Make me better than what they think of me, and forgive those sins of mine of which they have no knowledge, and do not hold me responsible for what they say.”