"l'enfer, c'est les autres"
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four."
— Albert Camus

"... au milieu des fléaux, qu'il y a dans les hommes plus de choses à admirer que de choses à mépriser."
— Albert Camus

"Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été."
— Albert Camus

"On ne nait pas femme, on le devient."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Le Deuxième Sexe)

"“J’ai trop a ecrire, c’est pourquoi je n’ecrire rien.”"
— —Stendhal, Journal, 1804

"La politique au milieu des intérêts d'imagination, c'est un coup de pistolet au milieu d'un concert."
— Stendhal

"The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning after breakfast."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelia Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
— Gabriel García Márquez

""He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."
"
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask."
— Joan Didion (Play It As It Lays)

"Very early in my life it was too late."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers.
I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.
I am worn out with desire.
I want to take Hélène Lagonelle with me to where every evening, my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out. I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
A pleasure unto death."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)