We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.

The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.

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