So it comes to this; one doesn’t need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn’t sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn’t it? Wait a minute, there’s a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it’s life without a break.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.

I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.

This then is the age of reason.

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.