"‘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."

"It was at such moments that he was most attracted by her, when her charming, almost dainty little person was possessed by a gripping force, an ardent, uneasy, graceless love of human beauty. “I,” he thought, “am no beauty,” and he felt alone in his turn.

Mathieu got up and tiptoed out to see if the water was boiling, then returned and sat down again beside Ivich; he looked tenderly at that little sick, soiled body, still so fine in slumber; he realized that he loved Ivich, and was surprised. Love was not something to be felt, not a particular emotion, nor yet a particular shade of feeling, it was much more like a lowering curse on the horizon, a precursor of disaster."

"They were waiting for nothing, they had all they wanted. It must be rather grim to hope for nothing except that life would continue indefinitely the way it started."

"It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it. I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn’t strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly."

"Ah, no matter who it was, he would have accepted any persons’ judgement, no matter whose, so it were not his own, not that ghastly self-contempt, that utterly futile, weak, moribund self-contempt, which seemed at every moment on the point of self-annihilation, but always survived."

"

“Not particularily, but—” And she went on with a piteous air: “I was thinking of the child. It was Gomez who wanted it done, you know. And when he wanted anything in those days—But it was horrible, I would never—if he went down on his knees to me now, I would never have it done again.” She looked at Mathieu with agonized eyes.

“They gave me a little parcel after the operation, and they said to me: ‘You can throw that down a drain.’ Down a drain! Like a dead rat! Mathieu,” she said, gripping his arm, “you don’t realize what you’re going to do.”

“And when you bring a child into the world, do you realize what you’re going to do?” asked Mathieu wrathfully.

A child: another conciousness, a little center-point of light that would flutter round and round, dashing against the walls, and never be able to escape.

"

"Perhaps it’s inevitable; perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is. That would be terrible,” he said to himself; “it would mean that we were naturally bogus."

"I’m no longer waiting. She is right: I have cleared myself out, sterilized myself into a being that can do nothing but wait. I am now empty, it is true, but I am waiting for nothing."

"He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else’s nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon."

"Man cannot be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all."

"I can’t say I feel relieved or satisfied, just the opposite, I am crushed. Only my goal is reached: I know what I have to know; I have understood all that has happened to me since January. The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I."

"When I found myself on the Boulevard de la Redoute again nothing was left but bitter regret. I said to myself: Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to so much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?"

"A being is fragile if it carries in its being a definite possibility of non-being."