“My mistakes are my life.”

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

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.