The more a man differs from me, the more real he seems, for he depends that much less on my subjectivity.

And since thought, when it shelters emotion, is more demanding than emotion by itself, the regime of consciousness in which I began to live what I felt made how I felt more down-to-earth, more physical, more titillating.

I look at my past life as at a field lit up by the sun when it breaks through the clouds, and I note with metaphysical astonishment how my most deliberate acts, my clearest ideas and my most logical intentions were after all no more than congenital drunkenness, inherent madness and huge ignorance. I didn’t even act anything out. I was the role that

The life of my emotions moved early on to the chambers of thought, and that’s where I’ve most fully lived my emotional experience of life.

Taking dreams for reality, living too intensely what I dream, has given this thorn to the false rose of my dreamed life: that not even dreams cheer me, because I see their defects.

It galls my intelligence when someone imagines that things will change by shaking them up.

But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

lost my soul, like an oar dropped in the water.

All that we love or lose – things, human beings, meanings – rubs our skin and so reaches the soul, and in the eyes of God the event is no more than this breeze that brought me nothing besides an imaginary relief, the propitious moment, and the wherewithal to lose everything splendidly.