What I need most of all is certainty.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself

She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.

In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.