What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed...I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.