All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.

I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

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")