“Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.”

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.

One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms.

Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.

People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

When you stubbornly give one man a chance, you arbitrarily deny it to another one.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior.

When the mind rests into its silent nature, it realise that love don’t come and go. Love can’t die.

There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.

We have beaten the living, but we cannot fight the dead.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

I took my grandmother to the emergency room. The doctor said that she was on an artificial life support system, and that although her brain was dead her heart was still beating. I though, “we’ve never had a democrat in the family before”.

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.