I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.

The truth, as the light, makes blind.

Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.

I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.

A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.