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“In the soft hum of well-mannered conversation they regained the confidence denied them when they walked the dark streets of town; evening dress was a sure charm against the plague.”

“Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything for them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship.

Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.”

“The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.”

“But you can get through the days there without trouble once you have formed habits. And since habits are precisely what our town encourages, all is for the best. Viewed from this angle, it’s life is not particularly exciting; that must be admitted. But, at least, Social unrest is quite unknown among us.”

“I see no need to dwell on the manner of loving in our town. The men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called “the act of love,” or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these extremes. That, too, is not exceptional. At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love one another without knowing much about it.”

“I’m afraid of cities. But you mustn’t leave them… In the cities, if you know how to take care of yourself, and choose the times when all the beasts are creeping in their holes and digesting, behind the heaps of organic debris, you rarely come across anything ore than minerals, the least frightening of all existants.”

existence is a fullness which man can never abandon

“Tired and old, they kept on existing, Against the grain, simply because they were too weak to die, because death could only come to them from the outside; strains of music alive can proudly carry their own death within themselves like an internal necessity: one they don’t exist. Everything exciting is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.”

“I realized that there is no halfway house between non-existence and this floating abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, and obscenity were concerned. In another world, circles, bars of music keep their pure and rigid lines. But existence is a deflection.”

“usually existence hides itself. It is there, all around us, in us, it is /us/, you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it…”

“how happy one must be to be nothing more than a Legion of Honour and a moustache and no one sees the rest”

“existence is an imperfection “

Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can’t describe it; it’s like the Nausea and yet it’s just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens /that I am myself and that I am here/; I am the one who splits the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

“It was as if he were sucked up to some very high roof by that rush of emotion, and the rest of him, like a white shell-sprinkled beach, left bare. It had been his undoing in Anglo-Indian society — this susceptibility.”

“And already, even as she stood there, in her well-cut clothes, it was beginning… People were beginning to compare her to popular trees, early Dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, abs garden lilies; and it made her life a burden for her…”

“And all the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; merry Hug Whitbread; then suddenly in cave Peter; then the roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! — that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant…”

“Goodness knows he didn’t want to go buying necklaces with Hugh. But there are tides in the body. Morning Mets afternoon.”

Radek, cold: “Shelve the revolution. Counterrevolution. You cannot conserve a revolutionary situation. The only things you can conserve are revolutionary phrases.”

“Only the Marxist organization can have the means, the forces, and the independence to keep the workers aware of what is taking place in their worldwide, universal, but uncoordinated (except at critical moments) efforts to create the new society. Finally, only the Marxist organization recognizes their daily activity as socialism.”

“… the task of a revolutionary organization is, first, to recognize these forms [of working class cooperation, mutual help and solidarity, organization], to explain the significance of them, and to let itself be guided by them in what it is doing and saying.”

“From Plato to Hegel, European philosophers were always struggling to make a total harmonious unity of societies riddled by class struggle. They were attempting the impossible, organizing in the minds what could only be organized in society.”

“A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out. And the insurrection, which rises above a revolution like a peak in the mountain chain of events, can no more be evoked by will than the revolution as a whole.” -Trotsky

“Our is a bourgeois revolution, therefore, the workers must support the bourgeoisie, say the [Mensheviks].

Ours is a bourgeois revolution, we Marxists say, therefore the workers must open the eyes of the people to the deception practiced by the bourgeois politicians… to depend entirely on their own strength, their own organization, their own unity, and their own weapons.” -Lenin

As Trotsky later commented, “the will to struggle is not stored up in advance, and is not dictated from above – it has in every occasion to be independently renewed and tempered.”

“Only what is taken by force / Will live, will be holy, / Will be taken forever.” -Evgeny Tarasov

“I don’t believe it is possible to contain in a single theory the broad panorama of the contemporary world. We have to explore it and know it episode by episode, facet by facet. Our judgement and our imagination will always lag behind the totality of the phenomenon.”

As Gonzalez Pravda had put it in his “Nuestros Indios,” “If someone says schooling, answer ‘schooling and bread.’”

“For the poor the revolution will not only be the battle for bread, but the conquest of beauty, art, thought, and every attribute of the spirit.”

In revolutionary periods “politics ceases to be the province of a routinized bureaucratic caste. In such times politics overflows the limits of the ordinary and invades and dominates every area of human life… The revolutionary idea must drive out the conservation ideas not only from the institutions but also from the mind and spirit of humanity.”

“Whoever is unable to admit initiative, talent, energy and heroism into the framework of historical necessity has not grasped the philosophical secret of Marxism.” -Trotsky