“I say to myself: "Who are you to measure infinite power?”

“...Who knows what death, anxiety of the living, Who knows what loneliness, end of the lovingI could say to myself of the love (I had): Let it not be immortal, since it is flame But let it be infinite while it lasts.”

“I am infinitely strange to myself.”

“But most important of all, she explained that it was all right to say 'No. I disagree.' That was a gift. I understood it was power. The power to think my own thoughts. The power to believe in myself.”

“When I say to myself 'Bernard,' who comes?”

“It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.”