When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

There is no limit to suffering.

An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.