I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.