“Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?”

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Every man should be capable of all ideas.

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.