I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.

Some other memories of the funeral have stuck in my mind. The old boy’s face, for instance, when he caught up with us for the last time, just outside the village. His eyes were streaming with tears, of exhaustion or distress, or both together. But because of the wrinkles they couldn’t flow down. They spread out, crisscrossed, and formed a smooth gloss on the old, worn face.

When the body is sad, the heart languishes.

We are condemned to live together.

After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace. "Yes, he replied. "The path of sympathy.