Aren’t people absurd! They never use the freedoms they do have but demand those they don’t have; they have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

-Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or.

Une parole d’elle était une faveur, et sa conversation vous couvrait de baisers.

-Marcel Proust, «À la recherche du temps perdu»; «Le Côté de Guermantes».

J’estompe les peurs, je lime les rêves, je rogne les désirs.

-Simone de Beauvoir, «Les mandarins».

Je ne suis personne, c’est facile à dire: je suis moi. Qui est-ce? où me rencontrer ? Il faudrait être de l’autre côté de toutes les portes, mais si c’est moi qui frappe, ils se tairont. J’ai senti soudain mon visage qui me brûlait, j’aurais voulu l’arracher.

-Simone de Beauvoir, «Les mandarins».

‘Oh!’
‘Ah!’
They came and fell together in a heap of crushed cardboard and spilled books.

-David Lodge, Small World.

“I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” his soul repeated it again and again.

-Rudyard Kipling, Kim.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

-Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.

How many words in this books.

They are meant for remembrance. As though words could carry memories.

For words are clumsy mountaineers and clumsy miners. Not for them to bring down treasures from the mountains’ peaks, or up from the mountains’ bowels.

But there is a living mindfulness that has passed gently, like a stroking hand, over everything memorable. And when the flame shoots up out of these ashes, hot and glowing, strong and mighty, and you stare into it as though spellbound by its magic, then -

But no one can write himself into this kind of pure mindfulness with unskillful hand and crude pen; one can write only in such white, undemanding pages as these. I did so on September 4, 1900.

-Franz Kafka.

                                                         Do you not weep?
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards, and bedews the heavens.

-John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi.

J’aurais voulu faire constater aux sceptiques que la mort est vraiment une maladie dont on revient.

-Marcel Proust, «À la recherche du temps perdu»; «Sodome et Gomorrhe».