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

"‘No one has interfered with my freedom; my life has drained it dry.’ Various tried and proved rules of conduct had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, flat seriousness, stoicism—all the aids whereby a man may savor, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life."

"‘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."

"On the one hand, though life is what I want, there is something I want more than life. That is why I do not cling to life at all cost. On the other hand, though death is what I loathe, there is something I loathe more than death. That is why there are dangers I do not avoid. Yet there are ways of remaining alive and ways of avoiding death to which a person will not resort. In other words, there are things a person wants more than life and there are also things he or she loathes more than death."

"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."

"When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one’s aim is to die a dog’s death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim."

"For life itself is no solution, life has no kind of existence which is chosen, consented to, and self-determined. It is a mere series of hungers and adverse forces, of petty contradictions which succeed or miscarry according to the circumstances of an odious gamble."

"Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes—but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others."

"All the other officers have two or three children by now and they read letters from home over and over again, and look at pictures their kids have drawn of houses and the sun and flowers. Those men have thrown opportunity away—there’s no hope for them any more. I’ve never done much, but I’ve lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I’m right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn someday, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance—and I’ll have to jump out of bed and set out alone."

"The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder."

"An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter,” replied the monk somewhat poetically. “Nowhere is there any warmth."

"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."

"I can neither live nor die, nor am I capable of not wishing to die or live. And all mankind resembles me."

"I don’t know what is going to become of me. I have no trade, no future.
Sick, depressed, blackly, heavily depressed."