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“I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one's secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown. My deepest joy is to write. To accept the world and to accept pleasure—but only when I am stripped bare of everything. I should not be worthy to love the bare and empty beaches if I could not remain naked in the presence of myself. For the first time I can understand the meaning of the word happiness without any ambiguity. It is a little different from what men normally mean when they say: 'i am happy.”
― Notebooks 1935-1942
― Notebooks 1935-1942
“Now!” exclaimed Lupin. “I am going to take a rest, feed myself up, and gradually become myself again. It’s all very well to be Baudru or another, to change your personality as you would your boots, and to select your appearance, your voice, your expression, your handwriting. But there comes a time when you cease to know yourself amid all these changes, and that is very sad. I feel at present as the man must have felt who lost his shadow. I am going to look for myself… and to find myself”
― Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief
― Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief
“His likeness? How can I trace it? I have seen Arsène Lupin a score of times, and each time a different being has stood before me… or rather the same being under twenty distorted images reflected by as many mirrors, each image having its special eyes, its particular facial outline, its own gestures, profile, and character.
“I myself,” he once said to me, “have forgotten what I am really like. I no longer recognize myself in a glass.”
A paradoxical whim of the imagination, no doubt; and yet true enough as regards those who come into contact with him, and who are unaware of his infinite resources, his patience, his unparalleled skill in make-up, and his prodigious faculty for changing even the proportions of his face and altering the relations of his features one to the other.
“Why,” he asked, “should I have a definite, fixed appearance? Why not avoid the dangers attendant upon a personality that is always the same? My actions constitute my identity sufficiently.”
And he added, with a touch of pride:
“It is all the better if people are never able to say with certainty: ‘There goes Arsène Lupin.’ The great thing is that they should say without fear of being mistaken: ‘That action was performed by Arsène Lupin.”
― The Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief
“I myself,” he once said to me, “have forgotten what I am really like. I no longer recognize myself in a glass.”
A paradoxical whim of the imagination, no doubt; and yet true enough as regards those who come into contact with him, and who are unaware of his infinite resources, his patience, his unparalleled skill in make-up, and his prodigious faculty for changing even the proportions of his face and altering the relations of his features one to the other.
“Why,” he asked, “should I have a definite, fixed appearance? Why not avoid the dangers attendant upon a personality that is always the same? My actions constitute my identity sufficiently.”
And he added, with a touch of pride:
“It is all the better if people are never able to say with certainty: ‘There goes Arsène Lupin.’ The great thing is that they should say without fear of being mistaken: ‘That action was performed by Arsène Lupin.”
― The Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief
Andre’s 2025 Year in Books
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