"What distinguished me from the rest was what mattered; what no one but I … could say—that was what I had to say."

"You have to let other people be right. It consoles them for not being anything else."

"I cannot apply to myself the distinctions and the reservations they insist on making—I exist only as a whole man. I l…"

"The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task."

"To the man whom death’s wing has touched, what once seemed important is so no longer; and other things become so whic…"

"What interest could I take in myself, except as a perfectible being? This unknown perfection, vaguely as I imagined i…"

"I soon realized that what are supposedly the worst things (lying, to mention only one) are hard to do only when you h…"

"Everything filled me with the joy of being alive until my whole being seemed no more than a hovering rapture: memorie…"

"There comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass"

"I made no attempt to conceal the tedium of these encounters. “They’re all alike,” I told her, “and each repeats the n…"