For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.

Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?

You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.

... I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.