The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot -- the sail he has seen.

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

One can hear all that's going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what's going on in this house.

Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.