Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

Man is the being whose project it is to be God.

I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.