49 quotes
I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" — That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. — Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
Hope is the normal form of delirium.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)