The simplest, truly simplest things, which nothing can make semi-simple, become complex when I live them. To wish someone a good day sometimes intimidates me. My voice gets caught, as if there were a strange audacity in saying these words out loud. It’s a kind of squeamishness about existing – there’s no other way to put it!

The constant analysis of our sensations creates a new way of feeling, which seems artificial to those who only analyse with the intellect, and not with sensation itself.

All my life I’ve been metaphysically glib, serious at playing around. I haven’t done anything seriously, however much I may have wanted to. A mischievous Destiny had fun with me.

To have emotions made of chintz, or of silk, or of brocade! To have emotions that could be described like that! To have describable emotions!

I feel in my soul a divine regret for everything, a choked and sobbing grief for the condemnation of dreams in the flesh of those who dreamed them. And I hate without hatred all the poets who wrote verses, all the idealists who saw their ideals take shape, all those who obtained what they wanted.

I haphazardly roam the calm streets, walking until my body is as tired as my soul, grieved to the point of that old and familiar grief that likes to be felt, pitying itself with an indefinable, maternal compassion set to music.

Sleep! To fall asleep! To have peace! To be an abstract consciousness that’s conscious only of breathing peacefully, without a world, without heavens, without a soul – a dead sea of emotion reflecting an absence of stars!