Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.

A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.