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"For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions."

“Normal is the most terrifying madness in the world.”

“It’s easier to go insane in the way best suited for your world.”

"Death came very close in the darkness. Better not know how close. Better not think, never for a moment."

"It is still night and I'm walking towards the forest. [...] I follow him, sick with fear but I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try and save me, I would refuse."

"To die and be forgotten and at peace. Not to know that one is abandoned, lied about, helpless."

Book Three

Book Two

“Until now she had always believed that it was failure only that was intolerable, but now she understood that victory too was intolerable, because the most shameful element of the desperate struggle was not that she remained on top, but that there was no chance of defeat.”

“Life is a succession of misunderstandings.”

“Where Hegel goes wrong, on the other hand, is in talking about faith, in not protesting loudly and clearly against the honour and glory enjoyed by Abraham as the father of faith when he should really be remitted to some lower court for trial and exposed as a murderer.”

"Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off."

“The peasants said the smoke from the crematories went straight to heaven, laying a soft carpet at God’s feet without even soiling them. I wondered whether so many Jews were necessary to compensate God for the killing of his son.”

“I almost believed that I wasn’t going to be allowed to escape; whatever I did would lead to another barrier, and then another, until I stopped and gave in.”

“I felt as if I had been fighting someone too strong for me for far too long.”

“Reality had become a nightmare, and sleep beckoned insistently; a black hole calling me, pain-free, lost in time, like death.”

“Words wasted into the snow and wind, shouted to no one in particular in a shaking fury of bitterness and grievance. Idiot words, as meaningless as the hissing empty wind around me.”

“…I could ignore much of the pain. It became one more difficultly to contend with and merged with all the other problems…”

"If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it's not long before you're conjuring u another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious—a bit more dangerous. I didn't like the thought of where it might be leading me, As if, in some strange way, the very nature of the game was controlling me, taking me towards a logical but frightening conclusion; it always unsettled me, this moment..."

"He was a dreamer, eternally absorbed in his fantasies. Because of his limitless good nature and colossal size, which kept him from noticing anything smaller than himself, he failed to give sufficient attention to what was going on, misunderstood all that was said, and, mistaking the views of his opponents for his own, agreed with everything."

“There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.”

"In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of the plague do not stand out like livid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path."

"Their despair saved them from panic, thus their misfortune had a good side. For instance, if it happened that one of them was carried off by the disease, it was almost always without his having had time to realise it. Snatched suddenly from his long, silent communion with a wraith of memory, he was plunged straightway into the densest silence of all. He'd had no time for anything."

“The defenders of traditional morality are seldom people with warm hearts.”

From ‘What I Believe’

"The men and women consume each other 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 each other without knowing much about it."

“Occasionally I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes.”

“What should I say about my life? That it’s long.”