Nothing in the world is worth turning one's back on what one loves.

The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

In that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.

Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.