We do not judge the people we love.

There is no salvation anywhere. The idea of salvation implies the idea of an absolute.

We make our own hell out of the people around us.

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.

What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

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