I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell