“The Occidental snobbery which is invading us, the gunboats, rapid-fire guns, long-range rifles, explosives... what else? Everything which makes death collective, administrative and bureaucratic - all the filth of your progress, in fact - is destroying, little by little, our beautiful traditions of the past. ”

“It is not so much the greatness of our troubles, as the littleness of our spirit, which makes us complain.”

“Everything - our houses, our clothes, our hairstyles - is meant to help us forget ourselves and to protect us from vanity, greed and envy, which are just forms of selfishness. If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one.”

“We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.”

“That sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.”

“Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.”