I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.

… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!

What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!

They took each other's advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.