people do need some commandment to rule over them in our century, when god's ten have been virtually forgotten! the whole moral structure of our time rests on the eleventh commandment; and the journalist came to realize that thanks to a mysterious provision of history he is to become its administrator, gaining a power undreamed of by a hemingway or an orwell.

I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means i ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility.

You know,' he went on, 'novels are the fruit of the human illusion that we can understand our fellow man. But what do we know about each other?' 'Nothing,' said Bibi. 'True,' said Joujou. The professor of philosophy acquiesced with a nod of the head. 'The only thing we can do,' said Banaka, 'is to give an account of our own selves. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie.

Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.

Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgement is legitimate, but that she refuses it a place in the novel.

There is in these words the beautiful maneuverability of the abstract rushing in to replace the intractability of the concrete.

Let us not have a computer psychology that makes us think we know it all. All answers on computers - but no surprises. The challenge of love. God reveals himself through surprises.

A person who is not convinced, enthusiastic, certain and in love, will convince nobody.

Let us be poised, wise and our own today.

I cannot help it; reason has nothing to do with it; I love her against reason-but who would as soon love me for my own sake, as she would love the beggar at the corner.

If she remember right, people who had a God didn't seem to hold to drinking' an' beating' their women. With a little luck maybe she wouldn't have to put up with that anyway.