Packed inside my sentences, LOCATION: 58
the key-words that won’t set me free. LOCATION: 60
I’ve just been dumped here inside my alphabet, LOCATION: 81
I’ll put Hamidou through the mill or I won’t have the courage to live. LOCATION: 86
a novel without continuity, LOCATION: 90
the unknowns of a fictitious equation, LOCATION: 90
imagine some total nonsense LOCATION: 91
this disorganized siege gives me a bulwark against sadness LOCATION: 91
we mingled our two lives in a river of inspiration that still flows in me this afternoon LOCATION: 96
your amazing body I reinvent again and again with less precision and more passion. LOCATION: 100
this atrocious erosion? LOCATION: 102
Everything from the past is crumbling. LOCATION: 102
I have no point of reference to help me measure my speed. LOCATION: 103
Nothing is hardening outside my window: characters and memories are liquefied in the pointless splendour of the alpine lake where I try to find my words. LOCATION: 103
For now, I’m at a table at the bottom of Lac Léman, plunged into its fluid sphere of influence which supplants my subconscious, joining my own depression to the languid depression of the Cimbrian Rhône, my imprisonment to the widening of its shores. LOCATION: 106
I no longer know why I’m writing this puzzle LOCATION: 121
Two or three censored novels can’t distract me from the free world I see out my window, from which I’m excluded. LOCATION: 124
that dazzling beginning makes me want to end my own cumulative prose, LOCATION: 127
I go on anyway, though I’m writing at a loss. No, that’s a lie: for the past few minutes I’ve known perfectly well that I will gain something from this game, I’ll gain time: an interval I cover with erasures and phonemes, fill with syllables and howls, cram with all my acknowledged atoms, multiples of a totality they’ll never equal. LOCATION: 129
I compose in highly automatic writing and while I’m spelling myself, I avoid homicidal lucidity. LOCATION: 131
I dazzle myself with words. LOCATION: 132
now that I’ve chopped my fury into devalued notions, LOCATION: 136
Infinite I shall be, in my own way and in the literal sense. LOCATION: 141
the stagnant waters of fiction. LOCATION: 149
Psychiatry is the science of individual imbalance enclosed within a flawless society. It enhances the standing of conformists and the well-integrated, not those who refuse; it glorifies all forms of civil obedience and acceptance. LOCATION: 155
Nothing feeds my soul any more: no starry night transmutes my desert into sheets of shadow and mystery. LOCATION: 166
Nothing offers me distraction or some substitute euphoria. LOCATION: 167
Everything abandons me at the speed of light, all the membranes break, allowing the precious blood to seep away. LOCATION: 168
By writing to you I shall touch you, LOCATION: 182
the India ink in which I can make out too many fleeting forms that resemble you but aren’t you. LOCATION: 185
I simply don’t seem able to decipher the code, and since I can’t translate it into my language, I write it down in the insane hope that by paraphrasing the nameless, I’ll finally give it a name. LOCATION: 202
I descend, compressed, to the bottom of Lac Léman, and I can’t step outside the flowing themes that constitute the thread of the plot. I’ve closed myself inside a constellate system that has imprisoned me in strictly literary terms, so much so that this stylistic sequestration seems to confirm the validity of the symbol I’ve used from the outset: diving. LOCATION: 205
I have only to continue drowning through words. LOCATION: 208
The sine curve of real-life experience doesn’t translate the ancient hope. LOCATION: 226
I’ve perverted my life line repeatedly and obtained less happiness through an accumulation of indignities, which has led me to give back less than nothing of it. LOCATION: 226
For years I’ve lived flattened with fury. LOCATION: 232
I’ve accustomed my friends to an intolerable voltage, to a waste of sparks and short circuits. LOCATION: 233
To spit fire, to cheat death, to be resurrected a hundred times, to run a mile in less than four minutes, to introduce a flame-thrower into the dialectic and suicidal behaviour into politics – that’s how I’ve established my style. LOCATION: 233
National leader of an unknown people! LOCATION: 238
The wages of the broken warrior are depression. LOCATION: 249
The wages of our national depression are my own failure; LOCATION: 249
The wages of my ethnic neurosis are the impact of the monocoque and the sheets of steel launched against an unshakable ton of obstacles. LOCATION: 251
I can dedicate myself to writing page after page of abolished words laid out in accordance with harmonies that are always pleasant to experience, LOCATION: 255
Our life could be summed up by some sad and voluptuous oaths exchanged one rainy evening in a car parked near the barracks on Île Sainte-H LOCATION: 285
Before I met you I was writing an endless poem. LOCATION: 286
K and I, drenched in the same flood of sorrow, lay down naked between cool sheets, annihilated voluptuously by one another in the timely splendour of our poem and the dawn. LOCATION: 300
the incantatory shock of our two bodies, LOCATION: 302
and now, at the end of this blazing dawn, I’m alone on a blank page LOCATION: 302
the pure song of her pleasure. LOCATION: 304
my paginated bed, LOCATION: 304
The burden of words inside me doesn’t stop the clear stream of time past from cascading into the lake. LOCATION: 309
a prisoner with no poet to sing of my exploits. LOCATION: 320
Superfluous words surge past my window, they darken the perimeter of memory and I capsize as I tell my story. LOCATION: 322
Thirty pieces of silver and I’d kill myself! I would even drop the price lower to cut myself with a shard of glass and be done with revolutionary depression! Yes, it would mark the end of the conspirator’s shameful disease, of mental fracture, of falls perpetrated in a police cell. LOCATION: 330
chilly or perhaps melancholy, LOCATION: 360
each sentence disconcerts me. I burn words, stages, memories, and I keep freeing myself from the tracery of this interpolated night. LOCATION: 433
I can’t help thinking that my written race in the shadow of Les Mosses and Le Tornettaz is a futile one, when I remind myself that I’m a prisoner here in an unassailable cage. LOCATION: 442
I spend my time encoding passwords, as if I were eventually going to escape! LOCATION: 444
I streamline my sentences so they’ll take flight sooner! LOCATION: 444
Wanting to be taken for someone else has made me into that other person; suddenly the two children he abandoned are mine, and I’m ashamed. LOCATION: 599
a cloistered life marks with despair the words imprinted on my broken memory. LOCATION: 656
My past is disembowelled by the hypocritical pressure of the verb. LOCATION: 664
Writing is a great expression of love. Writing used to mean writing to you; but now that I’ve lost you I still mass words together, mechanically, because in my heart of hearts I hope that my intellectual wanderings, which I reserve for born debaters, will make their way to you. LOCATION: 670
Then my book of ideas will be simply the cryptic continuation of a night of love with you, my absolute partner to whom I can write in secret by addressing myself to a readership that will never be anything more than the multiplication of your eyes. LOCATION: 672
Writing to you, I address the world. LOCATION: 674
Love is the cycle of the word. LOCATION: 674
I write to you infinitely, endlessly inventing the canticle I read in your eyes; through my words I place my lips on the blazing flesh of my country and I love you, desperately, as on the day of our first communion. LOCATION: 674
The fragile edifice I’d patiently erected to help me face up to hours of seclusion has developed cracks in all its girders, twisting and engulfing me as it is crushed. LOCATION: 681
The only thing that’s left for me in this world is to notate my elementary fall. LOCATION: 682
What’s most puzzling is his incredible autobiography, which he’s invented not in order to fool me but for some more perverse reason: to captivate me, cause me to doubt the reason of state that’s confronting us here in this confined space, conditioning me to see this man who’s speaking in bad faith as an enemy to kill. LOCATION: 860
I’m not writing, I am written. LOCATION: 887
The future act has long since known me. LOCATION: 887
The uncreated novel is dictated to me word by word and I appropriate it as I go, LOCATION: 887
I am creating something that outdistances me, that sets down before me the mark of my unpredictable footprints. LOCATION: 888
The imagination is a scar. I live my own invention and what I kill is already dead. LOCATION: 889
But if this shock that’s annihilating my ambition to write something in an original way is so devastating, if I’m suddenly deprived of my reason for writing because I perceive my forthcoming book as predicted and marked in advance, according to the Dewey system, with an infinitesimal coefficient of individuation, and because at the same time I still want to write, it means that writing doesn’t become pointless simply because I am stripping it of its need to be original, or because this genetic function doesn’t define it. At least an urge to be original isn’t the only thing that improves the image of the literary endeavour. One can undertake to write a spy novel that’s set anomalously on the shores of Lac Léman with some other motive than creating a unique work! Originality at all costs is a chivalrous ideal, an aesthetic Holy Grail that falsifies any expedition. Jerusalem the second, that overdone singularity, is nothing but a crusader’s obsession, a mythical retransposition of a stroke of fortune that is the basis on which powerful capitalism has been erected. LOCATION: 909
My dream is of a totalitarian art in constant genesis. LOCATION: 928
my book is writing me, LOCATION: 934
History will begin to write itself when we give to our pain the rhythm and the blinding power of war. Everything will take on the flamboyant colours of history when we march into battle, machine-guns at the ready. When our brothers die in ambushes, leaving the women alone to celebrate June 24, our writing will no longer be an event, it will become a document. The act alone will prevail. LOCATION: 939
I need to retrieve the thread of our story and the ellipsis that will take me back to the heat of our two consumed bodies. LOCATION: 975
my disguise is now that of a victim of the stunning murder I’m about to commit. LOCATION: 1152
I realize that I just have to start moving again, follow the handwritten curves, and reinvent my story. LOCATION: 1200
For these engraved chests filled with nothing, these roundels that send back images of war, and this apparently forgotten book that tells of Caesar’s battles are just so many initial letters bound together inextricably in a haughty and fascinating knot. It all bears a signature, that of the man for whom I’m waiting. LOCATION: 1301
Violence has broken me before I’ve had time to commit it. LOCATION: 1385
upon your lyrical expanse I lie down and live. LOCATION: 1422
I stretch out on the Abraham page and lie on my stomach to die in the blood of words LOCATION: 1659
All the words of the sequel will grab me by the throat; the ancient serenity of our language will be shattered by the shock of my story. LOCATION: 1693
The pages will write themselves in gunshots: the words will whistle above our heads, the sentences will shatter in the air LOCATION: 1705
Yes, that is the conclusion to the story: because everything has an end, I shall go to meet the woman who’s still waiting for me on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. That’s what I’ll say in the final sentence of my novel. And, a few lines later, I shall write in capital letters the words: THE END LOCATION: 1716