how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!

People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.

As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.

Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses.

If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.