Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

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.

... unhappiness is like marriage. We believe we chose it, but then it is choosing us. That is how it is, we can do nothing about it.

Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone ... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.

I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.

It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'