A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.

In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.

The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.