No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait.

Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.

We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.

We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.