“Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.”

I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?

Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.

If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.

When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.

My heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.

Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.

Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.

Be Impeccable with Your Word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean.

Whatever life takes away from you, let it go.

Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Every prayer is an agreement with yourself.

Don’t make assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want.

We have signed a lease that honors the 2004 agreement, while conforming to the emergency legislation that the Council passed last month.

Both the liberal and the conservative are in agreement: it is all very well to let the people alone, but only if they do what you want them to do.

We face an essential need to reach a definition of terrorism that will enjoy wide international agreement, thus enabling international operations against terrorist organizations.