How is it that all his thoughts circle around suicide? Is it permissible for suicide to be a sort of secret pleasure to a man? What is suicide anyway? Self-extinction. Rightly or wrongly. By what right? Why not? I tried to focus my thoughts on the one point: is suicide permissible? I had no answer. None. Because people are no answer, and can't be, nor is anything living, and not the dead either. By committing suicide, I am destroying something for which I am not to blame. Something entrusted to me, then? By whom? When? Did I realize it at the time? No. But an unignorable voice tells me that suicide is a sin. Sin? As easy as that? It's something that will bring the whole edifice to collapse, says the voice. Edifice? What edifice? His watchword, whether asleep or awake: suicide! It will choke him. He is bricking up one window after another. Before long, he'll have walled himself up. Then, once he can't see out anymore, because he can't breathe anymore, he'll be persuasive: because he'll be dead. I have the sense of standing in the shadow of a thought of his that is very close to me: the thought of his suicide.

"Their excuses have been noted. Their sexuality can be sniffed. One can feel what they think and what they want, these people, sense what forbidden things they are continually contriving. Their beds are under the window or in the doorway, or they don't even bother with beds: they go from atrocity to atrocity ... The men treat the women like pieces of tenderized meat, and vice versa, now one, now the other, depending on their respective imbecility. The primitive is everywhere. Some behave as if by prior arrangement, others seem to come to it naturally ... their too-tight trousers and skirts seem to drive them wild. The evenings go on and on: it's all too much. A few yards here or there, in or out, so as not to have to freeze ... Their mouths are taciturn, the rest goes wild ... day dawns, and you don't know which way is up. Sex is what does for them all. Sex, the disease that kills by its nature. Sooner or later, it will kill off even the deepest intimacy ... it brings about the conversion of one into the other, of good into evil, from here to there, from high to low. Godless, because ruination appears first ... the moral becomes immoral (a model of universal decline). The forked tongue of nature, you might say. The way the workers go around here, "he said, "they live for sex, like most people, like all people ... they live to the end of their days in a continual wild process against modesty and time and vice versa: ruination. Time sends them on their way to unchastity with a slap. Some are more accomplished at concealing it than others. With the canny ones, you only realize when they're all done. But it's for nothing. All of them live a sex life, and not a life."

"Childhood is all the same. Only to one person, it will seem ordinary, to a second benign, and to a third satanic."

"Nature is bloody," he said, "but bloodiest toward her own finest, most remarkable, and choicest gifts. She grinds them down without battin an eyelid."