The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when.

We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.

Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.

Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama. 

There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony. p. 120, first American edition

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other.

We are all secularised anarchists today.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?