Status Updates From L'âge de raison (Les Chemin...

He had never been able to engage himself completely in any love-affair, or any pleasure, he had never been really unhappy; he always felt as though he were somewhere else, that he was not yet wholly born. He waited. And during all that time, gently, stealthily, the years had come, they had grasped him from behind;

in vain he repeated the once inspiring phrases: "I must be free. I must be self-impelled, and able to say: I am because I will; I am my own begin-ning?" Empty, pompous words, the commonplaces of the intellectual.

he had said to himself: "I will be free," or rather he hadn't said anything at all, but that was what he wanted to say and it was in the nature of a bet; he had made a bet with himself that his whole life should be cast in the semblance of that unique moment.

I'm getting old. Here I am, lounging in a chair, committed to my present life right up to the ears and believing in nothing. And yet I also wanted to set out for a Spain of mine. But it couldn't be fixed. Are there many Spains?
I am there, absorbing the ancient taste of blood and iron-tainted water; I am my own taste, I exist. That's what existence means: draining one's own self dry without the sense of thirst.

"Friendship doesn't exist to criticize," Brunet used to say then. "Its function is to inspire confidence."

Besides, she took heroin. That wasn't a bad thing, in one sense; indeed, it was quite a good thing, in principle; Boris had talked to Ivich about it, and they had both agreed that it was a good thing. But there were ways of doing it: if one took it to destroy oneself, either in despair or by way of emphasizing one's freedom, that was entirely commendable. But Lola took it with greedy abandonment,

Since then Boris had regarded grown-ups as bulky and impotent divinities. If they bent down, they looked as though they were going to break; if they slipped and fell, the effect they produced in the onlooker was a desire to laugh and a sense of awe-stricken abhorrence. …... Grown-up people's tears were a mystical catastrophe, the sort of tears God sheds over the wickedness of mankind.

he looks like a man who means to enjoy life, and I don't think the worse of him for that; …...
I can't explain it, I get the feeling he's austere, and then if you look at his eyes, you can see he knows too much, he's the sort of fellow who can't enjoy anything in a simple way, either eating, or drinking, or sleeping with women; he has to think about everything,

"I'm not so much interested in myself as all that," he said simply.
"I know," said Marcelle. "It isn't an aim, it's a means. It helps you to get rid of yourself; to contemplate and criticize yourself: that's the attitude you prefer. When you look at yourself, you imagine you aren't what you see, you imagine you are nothing. That is your ideal: you want to be nothing."