I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations.

There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.

The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.

...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...

Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.

But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.

Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again?

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

I've seen some very beautiful drag queens.

And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!

I would never let myself knock out a journalist.

I'm not a show-off by nature.

My Swaraj will be not be a result of murder of others but a voluntary act of continuous self-sacrifice.

I'm like this wiry freak they pulled out of a bar two months ago and said, 'Let's throw it on the wall and see if it sticks.'

Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to thegrand interests, superficial success is of no account.

I like to imagine there were more of us in the beginning. Not many, I suppose. But more than there are now.