Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four

For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn't know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.

Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.

stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.