The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.

Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can...

Buy Fable! the book that rejuvenates your soul! makes your belly belly-laugh! turns your cares to dust!…likewise your moods, woes an wounds!…turns everything rosy, deflates spleen and bile! pocondria! not just any old work! not...

One little second of pleasure, a whole life of pain…my mother knew nothing of the pleasures of a good roll in the hay…she missed out on all that…like me, her son…a lifetime of sacrifice!…the woman...

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.

…she robbed me blind, the bitch!…and she’s still at it! everyone who’s ever done me wrong, robbed me, repudiated me, pillaged me has never suffered…and never will suffer! you could call it their reward!…robbing me...

And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or...

Tout ça c’est des regrets qui ne font pas bouillir la marmite.

People don’t deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.

Living, just by itself — what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom’s the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you’ve got to look as if you...

Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.

There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.

Vi er ikke annet enn tønner fulle av varme, halvråtne innvoller, og derfor har vi alltid vanskeligheter med følelsene våre. være forelsket er ingen kunst. Kunsten består i å unngå å gå i oppløsning. En...

You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country? They stuff an old wallet with putrid chicken innards. Well, take it from me, a man is just like that, except that...

Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself.

I don’t have to worry about Madame Ouche! she’ll still be robbing me blind when she’s dead!…having made her last confession and received extreme unction…all the cataclysms will pass over her without harming a single...

The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that’s why it’s usually depressing and disgusting to look at.

I hadn’t found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me … and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war...

All the currencies of Europe are relatives of the Dollar.

This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.

In my room I’d barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so...

Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere.

Death after all is only a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they can’t...

[T]he Dollar is always too light, a genuine Holy Ghost, more precious than blood.

Never believe straight off in a man’s unhappiness. Ask him if he can still sleep. If the answer’s ”yes,” all’s well. That is enough.

A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn’t got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.

Life must go on, even if it’s no joke…just pretend to believe in the future.

Les gens riches à Paris demeurent ensemble, leurs quartiers, en bloc, forment une tranche de g teau urbain dont la pointe vient toucher au Louvre, cependant que le rebord rebondi s’arrête aux arbres entre le...

Chin up, Ferdinand,” I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. “What with being chucked out of everywhere, you’re sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must...

The serious scientific public trusted him implicitly and consequently had no need to read him. If those people were to start getting critical, no further progress would be possible. They would spend a whole year...

There would be nothing but darkness, same darkness as everywhere else, an enormous darkness that swallowed up the road two steps ahead of us, only a little sliver of road about the size of your...

It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.

There’s something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t even try to...

…apparently “London” gave out my address! that’s what they’re saying…not just London, though! Brazzaville, too!…and said that I’m a dirty pornographer…a letch besides being the most despicable traitor of the century!…I’d make a urinal blush!...

Lovely sight, the Apocalypse! But absurdity, without limits? No Sir! there have to be certain limits…

A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there’s a war.

Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn’t quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and...

The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noise makers, mutilated erections,...

The rich don’t have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody’s happy.

Architecture is the alpha principle of all arts.

We have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad...

I’m recapitulating…condensing…it’s the Readers Digest style…people only have time to read thirty pages…apparently!…maximum!…that’s all they have time for! they horse around for sixteen hours out of twenty-four, they sleep, they copulate the rest, where would...

Of course the people in the metro didn’t see a thing!…what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they’ll still come out to refute me! make claims!…that nothing got bombed!…squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and...

Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it’s the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.

I’ve got quite a memory. Engraved in my mind, things are. I can’t forget anything…It’s not a sign of intelligence…Nothing to boast about, memory…that’s just how it is…

I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into...

Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention.

The novel can’t compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who’s had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day...

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It’s frightening how many people and things there are in a man’s past that have stopped moving. The living people we’ve lost in...

I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win.