It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

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

Men die and they are not happy.

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.

Morality, when formal, devours.