True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

A book is a suicide postponed.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.