Whenever my diarrhea let me go for a while, the fever took hold.
You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
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 dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that’s waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people.
It’s no joke being poor. Poverty is a giant, it uses your face like a mop to clear away the world’s garbage. There’s plenty left.
I had no great opinion of myself and no ambition, all I wanted was a chance to breathe and to eat a little better.
You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it’s one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure. There’s always the future.
Youth may be nothing more than a hurry to grow old.
Nobody can really resist music. You don’t know what to do with your heart, you’re glad to give it away.
Life is a classroom, and boredom is the monitor, always keeping an eye on you, you have to look busy at all costs, busy with something fascinating, otherwise he comes and corrodes your brain.
Love itself is misery and nothing else, misery lying out of our mouths, the bitch, and nothing else.
Pleasure and happiness come first. I think so too. When you start hiding from people, it’s a sign that you’re afraid to play with them. That in itself is a disease. We should try to find out why we refuse to get cured of loneliness.
“The earth is dead,” he said to me. “We people are just worms on top of it, worms on its fat, revolting carcass, eating its entrails and all its poisons . . . Nothing can help us, we were born rotten . . .
“Take it from me. There’s only one kind of freedom, only one, to see properly and have your pockets full of money. The rest is bullshit! . . .”
If someone tells you he’s unhappy, don’t take it on faith. Just ask him if he can sleep … If he can, then all’s well. That’s good enough.
One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort . . . You’re good and sick of hearing yourself talk . . . you abridge . . . You give up … For thirty years you’ve been talking . . . You don’t care about being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you’d reserved yourself among the pleasures of life . . . You’re fed up … From that time on you’re content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you’d have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others . . . But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it’s there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run out to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we’ve vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We’re nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore.
You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
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 dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that’s waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people.
It’s no joke being poor. Poverty is a giant, it uses your face like a mop to clear away the world’s garbage. There’s plenty left.
I had no great opinion of myself and no ambition, all I wanted was a chance to breathe and to eat a little better.
You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it’s one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure. There’s always the future.
Youth may be nothing more than a hurry to grow old.
Nobody can really resist music. You don’t know what to do with your heart, you’re glad to give it away.
Life is a classroom, and boredom is the monitor, always keeping an eye on you, you have to look busy at all costs, busy with something fascinating, otherwise he comes and corrodes your brain.
Love itself is misery and nothing else, misery lying out of our mouths, the bitch, and nothing else.
Pleasure and happiness come first. I think so too. When you start hiding from people, it’s a sign that you’re afraid to play with them. That in itself is a disease. We should try to find out why we refuse to get cured of loneliness.
“The earth is dead,” he said to me. “We people are just worms on top of it, worms on its fat, revolting carcass, eating its entrails and all its poisons . . . Nothing can help us, we were born rotten . . .
“Take it from me. There’s only one kind of freedom, only one, to see properly and have your pockets full of money. The rest is bullshit! . . .”
If someone tells you he’s unhappy, don’t take it on faith. Just ask him if he can sleep … If he can, then all’s well. That’s good enough.
One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort . . . You’re good and sick of hearing yourself talk . . . you abridge . . . You give up … For thirty years you’ve been talking . . . You don’t care about being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you’d reserved yourself among the pleasures of life . . . You’re fed up … From that time on you’re content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you’d have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others . . . But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it’s there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run out to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we’ve vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We’re nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore.
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