"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."

"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."

"And it’s not “clever lonely” (like Morrissey) or “interesting lonely” (like Radiohead); it’s “lonely lonely,” like the way it feels when you’re being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder."

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

"No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we were non-existent things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily torture would be a relief."

"Man disavows, and Deity disowns me.
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me…"

"Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flag-staff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away from death—
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs."

"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."

"When shall we meet again? When will the earthy taste of your lips come again to brush the anxiety of my mind? Will all our sensations remain forever intellectual, and will not our dreams succeed in igniting one soul whose feeling will help us to die? What is this death in which we are forever alone, in which love does not show us the way?"