La vie est atroce ; nous savons cela. Mais précisément parce que j’attends peu de choses de la condition humaine, les périodes de bonheur, les progrè… - Marguerite Yourcenar

Those sages of the ancient world, unbound by dogma of any kind, thought as we do in terms of physics, or rather, physiology, as applied to the whole universe: they envisaged the end of man and the dying out of this sphere.

Nothing moves me more than courage: so total a sacrifice deserved complete trust from me. But she never believed that I trusted her, since she did not suspect how much I distrusted others. In spite of appearances to the contrary, I do not regret having yielded to Sophie as much as it lay in my nature to do; at the first glance I had caught sight of something in her incorruptible, with which one could make a compact as sure, and as dangerous, as with an element itself. Fire may be trusted, provided one knows that its law is to burn, or die.

Se, per miracolo, qualche secolo venisse aggiunto ai pochi giorni che mi restano, rifarei le stesse cose, persino gli stessi errori, frequenterei gli stessi Olimpi e i medesimi Inferi.