I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space.

If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.