“…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy.”

“Happy are those who own nothing.”

“I went on happily reading well into the night, when no one ventured on to the decks of the Donizetti, except for sinful shadows who were careful not to interrupt me, careful not to disturb my reading, happiness, happiness, passion regained, genuine devotion, my prayers rising up and up through the clouds to the realm of pure music, to what for want of a better name we call the choir of the angels, a non-human space but undoubtedly the only imaginable space we humans can truly inhabit, an uninhabitable space but the only one worth inhabiting, a space in which we shall cease to be but the only space in which we can be what we truly are...”

“Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.”

“But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization.”

“These days there's no time to be bored, happiness has vanished somewhere in the world, and all that's left is dismay.”

“A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.”