Lexi’s Reviews > Nausea > Status Update

“You complain because things don’t arrange themselves around you like a bouquet of flowers, without your taking the slightest trouble to do anything. But I never asked as much: I wanted action.”

“Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast- or else there is nothing more at all.”

“A tree scrapes at the earth under my feet with a black nail. I would so like to let myself go, forget myself, sleep. But I can’t, I’m suffocating: existence penetrates me everywhere, through the eyes, the nose….”

“This face is so outspoken, so frank- but their tender, abstract soul will never let itself be touched by the sense of a face.”

“You see that you don’t love them. You wouldn’t recognize them in the street. They’re only symbols in your eyes. You are not at all touched by them: you’re touched by the Youth of the Man, the Love of Man and Woman, the Human Voice.”

“I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.”

“I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist.”

“How can I, who have not the strength to hold to my own past, hope to save the past of someone else?”

“I have only my body: a man who entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn’t complain: all I wanted was to be free.”

“I try to refresh my memory; I need to feel all the tenderness that Anny inspires; it is there, this tenderness, it is near me, only asking to be born. But the smile does not return : it is finished. I remain dry and empty.”