I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.