Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.

There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and foremost vain.

Maybe I'd never see him again... maybe he'd gone for good... swallowed up, body and soul, in the kind of stories you hear about... Ah, it's an awful thing... and being young doesn't help any... when you notice for the first time... the way you lose people as you go along ... the buddies you'll never see again... never again... when you notice that they've disappeared like dreams... that it's all over... finished... that you too will get lost someday... a long way off but inevitably... in the awful torrent of things and people... of the days and shapes... that pass... that never stop.

When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.

Most people die at the last minute; others twenty years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth.

History doesn't pass the dishes again.