"Alas, after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face."

"The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action."

"From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes “responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.” It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, “the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?"

"There is only one liberty, to come to terms with death. After which, everything is possible."

"Whatever does not kill me strengthens me.”
Yes, but… And how painful it is to dream of happiness. The crushing weight of it all. Better to say nothing and pay attention to everything else."

"No one works? No one suffers?”
“Yes, millions of men.”
“Then that’s the common people."

"I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I just as well could have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that, I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why."

"’Well, so I’m going to die.’ Sooner than other people will, obviously. But everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living—and for thousands for years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying. At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty years more of life ahead of me. But I simply had to stifle it by imagining what I’d be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway. Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter."

"But in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman."

"For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

"But when you don’t like your own life, when you know that you must change lives, you don’t have any choice, do you? What can one do to become another? Impossible. One would have to cease being anyone, forget oneself for someone else, at least once. But how? Don’t bear down too hard on me. I’m like that old beggar who wouldn’t let go of my hand one day on a cafe terrace: “Oh, sir,” he said,” it’s not just that I’m no good, but you lose track of the light.” Yes, we have lost track of the light, the mornings, the holy innocence of those who forgive themselves."

"Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars."