“Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular, what normal woman wants affection?”

Do we mean love, when we say love?

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

To have been always what I am – and so changed from what I was.

Nothing is more real than nothing.

What do we do now, now that we are happy?

For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!

Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.

Man does not live by murder alone. He needs affection, approval, encouragement and, occasionally, a hearty meal.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

I would tell anyone who wants something from someone else to feign not wanting it. People are perverse. If you show great affection to them, they’ll run the other way.

We fear rejection, want attention, crave affection, and dream of perfection.

Once you have drunk from the water of unconditional love, no other well can satisfy your thirst. The pangs of separation may become so intense that seeking the affection of the Beloved becomes an obsession.

You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent.

Parental affection is, perhaps, the blindest modification of perverse self-love

Few, I believe, have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with.