"‘Life was not going fast enough in me, I am speeding it up. The curve was sagging, I am filling it out again. I am a man, I am the master of my body, I am proving it.’
Well wedged up, pillows piled behind the head, feet against the bottom of the bed, well braced. The chest thrust upwards, well exposed. One knows where one’s heart is.
A revolver is solid, it is made of steel. It is an object. To come up against an object at last."

"Suicide is the means of men whose resilience has been eaten away by rust, the rust of the daily round. They were born for action, but they have delayed their action; so action turns back on them with the swing of a pendulum. Suicide is an act, the act of those who have not been able to accomplish others. It is an act of faith, like all acts. Faith in one’s neighbor, in the existence of one’s neighbor, in the reality of the self and the other selves."

"Their world is closed to me, decidedly closed. And it is there that women are. There is nothing to be said against the world of men and women. It is a world of brutes. And if I kill myself, it is because I’m not a successful brute. But the rest, thought, literature, oh! I shall kill myself because I have been wounded on that side by an abominable lie. Lies, lies. They know that no truth is possible, and yet they speak of it. They speak of it, the bastards."

"Everybody likes me, and nobody likes me. I am alone, quite alone."

"‘How disgusting all this is,’ he groaned to himself, ‘How well life knows how to humiliate us. But I shall pass into death before the others.’"

"Alain gave a long, hollow laugh. Never had he such a precise feeling of his impotence. For him, the world was only peopled by empty shapes. It was enough to make you scream, to make you die."

"I only know myself. Life is myself. After that is death. I, I am nothing; and death is nothing twice over."

"The circle of solitude armed with inverted spikes could again be felt. He really would have to kill himself."

"‘It’s just as I say. I’m awkward, I’m clumsy, I’ve taken endless trouble to give myself more grace. I had delicacy in my heart, but not in my hands.’
‘You pretended to be clumsy to be funny, but you did it on purpose.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong: I felt clumsy so I tried to make it funny. But I have never been able to resign myself to succeeding only as a clown.’
‘But you’re only like that when you’re at low ebb.’
‘My life is just one low ebb.’
‘But what would you have liked to do?’
‘I should have liked to captivate people, to hold them, to attach them to me. To stop things moving around me. But everything has always slipped away."

"Destruction is the opposite to faith in life; if a man over the age of eighteen succeeds in killing himself he must be endowed with a certain sense of action. Suicide is the means of men whose resiliance has been eaten away by rust, the rust of the daily round. They were born for action, but they have delayed their action; so action turns back on them with the swing of a pendulum. Suicide is an act, the act of those who have not been able to accomplish others. It is an act of faith, like all acts. Faith in one’s neighbor, in the existence of one’s neighbor, in the reality of the self and the other selves."

"Everything was simple, plain, everything was over. Or rather there had been no beginning, there would be no end. There was nothing but this moment, eternal. There was nothing else, absolutely nothing. And it was nothingness itself, overwhelming."

"Alain gave a long, hollow laugh. Never had he such a precise feeling of his impotence. For him, the world was only peopled by empty shapes. It was enough to make you scream, to make you die."

"And in the mirror, he looked further, beyond his reflection. This empty room, this solitude… An immense shudder gripped him in the small of his back, right to the marrow, and ran from his feet to his head in an icy thunderbolt: death was present in person. It was solitude: he had threatened his life with it as though with a knife and now this knife had turned round and pierced his guts. No one, no hope left at all. Incurable solitude."

"And the night and the ecstacy were nothing but sleep. In the end nothing but that: night and sleep. Why should he try to struggle against his destiny? Why had he been tormenting himself for the last months, making himself suffer? He had been afraid: at a certain moment he had perceived that chain of causes and effects which, dragging him back to the beginning, was destroying him: drugs lost him his women and his friends. Then, with neither the one nor the other, no more money, no more drugs.

Unless it were the final dose with which one settles the account and disappears."

"Their world is closed to me, decidedly closed. And it is there that women are. There is nothing to be said against the world of men and women. It is a world of brutes. And if I kill myself, it is because I’m not a successful brute. But the rest, thought, literature, oh! I shall kill myself because I have been wounded on that side by an abominable lie. Lies, lies. They know that no truth is possible, and yet they speak of it. They speak of it, the bastards."