Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.

Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.

Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity - happiness was human, eternity ordinary. What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.