1. Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I make up my mind: it is here, it belongs to me--and already is long since past. From morning to night, fabricating the past!
The Trouble with Being Born
2. Our pleasures are not lost, nor do they disappear; in another way, they mark us as much as our pains. The one among them which seemed to have vanished forever will save us from a crisis, will plead, unknown to us, against one of our disappointments, against some temptation to abdicate, to surrender; it will create in us new links of which we are not conscious, and reinforce a heap of little hopes which will counterbalance that tendency of our memory to preserve only vestiges of the atrocious, the terrible. For our memory is a venal thing: it sides with our pains, it has sold itself to our sufferings.
The Temptation to Exist
