“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

“But you looked much more like a fellow who had just realised that he has been living on ideas that don’t pay.”

“I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it.”

“I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity.”

“Once Right has taken hold of a man exorcism cannot drive it out.”

“It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”

“I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.”