The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.
To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
There is no reality except in action.
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.
This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.
If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.
Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.
I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.
One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life, and nothing else.
I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ?
To this very moment…