There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans.

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.

Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.