When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.

I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.

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.