An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.

Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

The end of their passion consists of loving uselessly at the moment when it is pointless.

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

I was comfortable in all, I admit, but at the same time, nothing satisfied me. Each joy made me seek another.