Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre uses the fictionality of his fiction to ask us to reflect on the fictionality — or at least, the arbitrariness — of reality itself.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon.

a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

choice. I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one.

Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?

I never vomit when I’m drunk

must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.