I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.

It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.

Man hardly comes in more than two varieties, wherever he is, whatever he does: workers and pimps ... they're either one or the other! ... and inventors, the worst kind of jobholder! ... they stand condemned! ... the writer who doesn't pimp along, peacefully plagiarizing, who doesn't pump out the pop stuff, he's had it! ... everybody hates him!

The best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. There’s no such thing as intelligent vanity. It’s an instinct. And you’ll never find a man who is not first and formenost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination.

Well, you know... experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer...it's incommunicable.