Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.

You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.

-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.