Bonjour Tristesse / A Certain Smile

And yet it's probably this moment that I will have loved the most, the one when I accepted the fact that life is just as it appears to me now, quietly heart-breaking.

It is always through the bodies of other people that you discover your own body, the length of it and the smell of it, distrustfully at first, and then with recognition.

I would have liked to ask people: 'Are you in love?' or 'What are you reading?' but I never wondered what their job was, although to them it was often of prime importance.

Now he himself was abandoning me and rendering me defenceless. I looked at him and thought: ‘You don’t love me as you used to. You are betraying me,’ and I tried to make him understand this without actually speaking.

And yet there were things that I loved greatly: Paris, certain smells, books, love and my present life.

You prefer people whom you are treating badly to be cheerful. It's less disturbing.

I had in my hand the warm hand of an unknown young man who meant nothing to me and it made me want to laugh.

Happiness is a flat expanse without landmarks.

My father was already growing away from me. I was obsessed, tortured, by the embarrassed expression he had had at table and by how he had turned his face away.

Perhaps I should give up books and conversation and walks, and head for a place where the pleasures of money and frivolity and other absorbing distractions could be enjoyed. Perhaps I should acquire the means to do so and myself become a thing of beauty.

At first I resented him for complicating what had been the happiest and indeed the purest thing between us, but I did not know that in some cases people would rather look for any explanation, even the worst, than accept the obvious and the banal.

She seemed, that evening, to combine together everything that was attractive about maturity.