Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.