I'd seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I'd better go out, I said to myself, I'd better go out again.

They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn’t go any futrther because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.

An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time.

The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.

Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you.

Chin up, Ferdinand," I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. "What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.