That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.
To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.
Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.
Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.
Do you always believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.
When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.
I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
The only sin is the sin of being born.
The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.
We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?
It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.
I gave up before birth.
But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.
Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.
Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.
What was God doing with himself before the creation?
My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.
I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.
Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!
Lick your neighbor as yourself!
To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other, (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity.)
The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.
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