To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.

Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.

I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

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.