I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side. - Jean-Paul Sartre

I am going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. the true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them... there is nothing.

Suddenly they existed, then suddenly they existed no longer: existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing — not even a memory. Existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere; existence — which is limited only by existence.