Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death.

So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.

Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb.

Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.

I should wish [Alain Robbe-Grillet] to realize that Guinea exists.

When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.