As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.

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After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.

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The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.

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Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera.

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She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.

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In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

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Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

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But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.

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Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

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Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.

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