"After the chaos, the cosmos." "Thanks to a secular training," "I have attained an almost perfect level of tolerance," " of disdain, almost." "Over the course of an infinity, I know that anything can happen to a man;" "his virtuous behaviour, whether past or future merits nothing but goodness." "He may, however, merit nothing but betrayal, as a result of his past or future infamy." "Seen under this light, all my acts are just, but indifferent." "Under this light, I become paralysed in contemplation." "No-one is anyone." "I am God, I am Eros," "I am a demon, I am the world." "A tiresome way to say that I don't exist at all." "Stupidity and intelligenee thus cancel each other out." "Sometimes, something exceptionally exciting will return me to the physical world." "This morning the city, there is an elemental joy to be had in the rain." "But I have achieved such perfect tranquility that I no longer stand up." "A bird has nested on my chest." "I'm leaving." "It's time to abandon the bright lights of the civilized world." "It's too late for attempts to be reasonable and educated." "Which in any case make life highly unattractive." "Whether secretly or not, we must change completely, or cease to exist altogether." "The world to which we belonged gave us nothing to love beyond the inadequacies of each individual." "One's existence is limited by one's commodities." "A world one cannot love to death represents nothing more than an obligation to work." "Compared to previous worlds it is hideous, the most ill-conceived of all." "In previous worlds, one could lose oneself in ecstasy which is impossible in this world of educated vulgarity." "The advantages of a civilization can be measured by the ways in which men profit from them." "Today's men profit from civilization by becoming more degraded than all of their predecessors put together." "Life always seems to be tumultuously incoherent;" "its grandeur and its reality to be found only in ecstacy and in ecstatic love." "He who ignores or misunderstands ecstacy is an incomplete being whose thought is reduced to mere analysis." "Existence is more than a restless void." "It's a dance which forces us to dance fanatically." "When the objcet of thought is dead and fragmentary, the thought itself has an internal life, like that of a flame." "There's no point in responding to those who believe that this world exists and justify themselves accordingly." "When they speak, you can see them without hearing them." "And even if you look at them, you can see only what exists far in the distance behind them." "There's no point in exciting oneself "en route", trying to attract the attention of those who have only vague desires such as wasting time, laughing or becoming eccentric." "You have to advance without a backward glance, paying no attention to those who haven't the strength to escape their immediate reality." "Humanity overextends itself, trying to be the raison d'etre of the universe." "If it becomes vital to the survival of the universe, it becomes a slave." "An unfree existence is an empty, neutered existence;" "and a free existence is in danger." "As long as the earth engendered nothing but ectaclysms, trees and birds, it was a free universe." "Liberty's gleam became tarnished when the earth produced a being who placed the laws of necessity above the universe itself." "Man remained, however, free from necessity." "He is free to resemble everything in the universe that he was not." "He could ignore the thought that it was either God or himself that prevented everything else from becoming absurd." "Man escaped his own brain as one escapes from a prison." "Beyond the confines of his own identity, he discovered, not God," " who represents prohibition - but a being who ignored all prohibitions." "Beyond my own identity" "I discover a being who makes me laugh, because he has no head, who fills me with anguish, since he consists of both innocence and crime." "He holds a weapon made of iron in his left hand, flames which resemble a sacred heart in his right hand," "In the same burst of energy he unites birth and death." "He is neither man nor God." "He's not me, he's more than me." "His stomach is a maze in which he has lost himself, in which I lose myself with him, in which I find myself as him, in other words, a monster." "In truth, the desert which surrounds me is terrifying." "I'm the last man, crouching." "Spring, Summer," "Autumn, winter." "No-one answers me." "Rocks." "There you have it." "The absence of being." "Embrace the stones!" "The ants!" "And the silence..." "The fire!" "I'll tell you about the dinosaurs." "One day, in the forest, I saw a dinosaur grazing peacefully and then suddenly" "it was attacked by a tiger." "The tiger savagely gnawed at its tail and the dinosaur didn't flinch, it kept right on grazing." "Then suddenly the dinosaur sort of rolled over on its side and died." "Dinosaurs realize that they're dead ten minutes or so after their actual physical death." "Their nervous system is so huge that pain takes minutes and minutes to travel through their body and reach their brain." "All the women now live in the forest alone, with their babies on their backs because that way it's easier to walk." "From time to time they go into the cities" "to visit the men." "That is to say, to visit a couple of men." "I think it's great." "It makes for moments of great intensity." "And then..." "And then what?" "Then they return to their mountains a little more alone, a little crazier." "A back and forth" "which never ends." "That which touches from afar and which creates." "Chinese people live in your caves!" "Watch out!" "Our air is a bit dry." "We have a furious desire for daylight." "Our head does not yet exist." "We leave strained axioms behind us, sterilized and ready to use." "Have you heard Nero's story?" "He strangled himself." ""Oh, what an artist is dying within me!"" "This world is frozen." "I'm not sure what we're going to do but it'll be the terror of the earth." "The trash, they're all in the trash." "There's garbage everywhere up there." "There's nothing but garbage." "I'm no longer far away from that final instant when every aspect of my being, by means of fusion and synthesis" "becomes the promise and the absence of a future that doesn't belong to me." "Please grant me my silence, allow me to take my leave." "We live our own interior lives as well as those of the others." "We now see Europe as a blank slate." "They throw us in amongst the dead." "Does anything happen in moderation on this earth?" "At this very moment, in Paris a man is making himself a brain." "Do you think he'll ask himself the same question?" "We live our lives according to the boundary which separates the absence of Gods from the absence of men." "I'm making progress," "I'm making progress," "I'm making progress." "We're going to bring you the terrible laughter of the idiot." "We have to get out of here." "We've had enough we have to leave." "Enough." " Yes, enough." "They're throwing us in the garbage." " Let's get out of here." "The ones up above." " They have us stuek here." "They keep throwing us in the garbage." "We have to get out of here." "I've had enough." " At last..." "It's those ones up above that have keeping us here." "We have to get out of here." " Never mind, we're leaving." "We have to leave right away." "Enough." " Enough." "Oh, I'm sorry!" "I swear, in two years time we'll have the whole earth in convulsions." "I'm lying down." "I'm waiting for the head... of a stillborn child." "I can't stand the facility of fiction." "I demand reality." "I'm going mad." "Oh, you make it easy to see the misery which has befallen us." "Thank you, thank you, your highness." "Thank you." "Thank you, your highness." "I feel like I'm made of lead." "The absolute banality." "Nothing." "Come on." "Nothing is going to happen to me." "Adaptation:" "Moira Tierney"