Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.

The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

...He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.