without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.