After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.