Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.

How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.