After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances. I may be an orange peel.

Even God has a hell: his love of Mankind.

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities.

Maybe this is how I'll go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and crying, laughing and singing, laughing so as to forget that I am alone, that it is the end of my life, that death is...

It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words "justice,"...

If you won't share my life with me, maybe you'll share my death.

Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

Tessa was convinced that it was a lie, and also that everything she had done in her life, telling herself that it was for the best, had been no more than blind selfishness, generating confusion and...

The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles...

- Why have I lived, Lucía? Before dying I have to find out why I am in this world. It's true what you say, I have been so numb for so long that I wouldn't know where to start living again....

Verily, men gave themselves their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve...

We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us. "You're joking." "Wish I was."

We are lost, lost,' said Gollum. 'No name, no business, no Precious, nothing. Only empty. Only hungry; yes, we are hungry. A few little fishes, nasty bony little fishes, for a poor creature, and they...

All wisdom ends in paradox.

Man, he said, I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want. What do we want? I asked blurrily. Aw, man, you know, he said. We just want,...

A long fall. Dinah had ceased to even think in terms of up and down. The concept of falling had become meaningless to her.

For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life.

I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you? You. But you should not have created me free.

I have no taste for work any longer, I can do nothing more except wait for night. Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.

Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence.

We will freedom for freedom's sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others...

There is no reality except in action.

Life appears as a long nightmare in this reasoning, from which one can be freed through death, which would then be a kind of awakening. But awakening to what? That irresoluble moment of throwing...

He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing color, or sound, or meaning. He will...

and when the hour is come that has been set for each of us before ever we can walk or talk, then what need of mourning?

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and...

It was autumn, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive. The fetus bailed out without a...

Death was not just a permanent probability, as I had always felt, but an immediate reality.

An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.