“Only after I've lived more or better, will I manage to depreciate what is human," she sometimes told him. "Human-me. Human-mankind separated into individuals. To forget them because my relationships with them can only be sentimental. If I seek them out, I demand or give them the equivalent of the same old words we always hear, 'fraternity,' 'justice.' If They had any real value, it wouldn't be because they are the apex, but the base of a triangle. They'd be the condition rather than the fact itself. Yet they end up occupying all of our mental and emotional space precisely because they are impossible to realize, they are against nature. They are fatal, in spite of everything, in the state of promiscuity in which we live. In this state hatred becomes love, which is really no more than the quest for love, never attained except in theory...”