Here are some of my favorite lines from the book:
"The war every man wages against himself,
the most exhausting of all, even worse than the other civil war he wages
throughout his life against women. From his mother down to the latest
nymphet. Compared with these two wars, the third, which merely aims at
changing the social order, is peanuts. You occasionally get killed in
it but you don't destroy yourself."
"Women really know only one civil war,
the war they've been waging against men, unremittingly, for thousands
of years."
"Classical warfare has certain rules," he went on. "So does guerrilla warfare, with a few additional rules thrown in. Guerrilla activity can't be carried on without political support, without the backing of the local population. Regular armies don't give a damn about this; that's why they can't fight effectively against guerrillas."
"For you, what does it mean
to succeed or fail in life?"
"Being king! Any man who hasn't
tried at least once, to be king, if only for one night, if only for one
hour, who hasn't dreamt of dominating the world, himself and everyone
else - in my opinion, that man has failed. He dies without having received
the crown. But if he has been crowned, even if he's exiled from his kingdom,
even if he's resigned to all the degradations of daily life, he'll bear
the mark of his coronation forever."
"A revolution he told us, is still
the only way of restoring a semblance of reason to a world of unreason,
of cutting away the rot, checking this squalid decomposition of a civilization
which still has its merits. Revolution alone can revive the hopes of our
desperate universe. The proof of its utter desperation is the heroes it
has produced: the cosmonauts, conquerors of space, robots radio-controlled
from Earth by computers, or else those crackpots, willful explorers of
the ignoble and undefined! Change is more necessary than law and order,
for it's always during a period of law and order, and in the name of law
and order, that systems congeal and injustices are committed.
That's why men like us, men of a certain
tradition are bound to be tempted by revolutionaries. What is a revolutionary?
Someone who wants to prevent the world from falling asleep replete, glutted,
yet always famished, like certain invalids; someone who refuses to allow
this world to be confined to a mere consumer society. But there's one
danger: many of those who call themselves revolutionaries are really trying
to substitute one form of oppression for another, on account of their
overweening vanity or from self-interest… or else they're maniacs
for the absolute, and choose to overlook the fact that man is not a mental
conception but a creature of flesh and blood, of nobility and weakness."
"If you really love a land, you plough it and sow it, you inseminate it. Why didn't you inseminate your wife? But keep your secrets. There comes a time when a man's only remaining assets are his secrets, even if they're not very wholesome. That's why I condemn all those people who try to eradicate them, all those psychoanalysts who kill a man while claiming to liberate him."
"Colonel Craight, who knows Latin America better than anyone, will tell you that ideas count for nothing here; but sentiments, hatred or love, friendship or repulsion, personal bonds, the family, take precedence over everything else."
"Instead of setting your people the example of Soviet Russia, or even Cuba, instead of trying to saddle them with complex political systems that are already out-of-date and incapable of renewal, why not present them with some great magnanimous crusade, even if it seems mad? Let it illuminate the world if only for one night, something of it will remain."
"I tried to believe in all the reforms.
I believed in Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. But one day I realized
that the men appointed to carry out these reforms were the very men whom
it would pay for the reforms to fail."
"A remarkable example of psychological warfare: fabricate your adversary, then kill him off."
"The most beautiful poem is the cry of a woman being pleasured."
"Is there any woman you love? If you
have to think twice, there isn't."
"Do you want to see her photo?"
"When you love a woman you don't need
her photo. She's present in every fold of your skin. You keep the taste
of her on your tongue and her scent on your fingers."
"He did not mind losing money or being deceived by a woman. There was only one thing in the world he dreaded: being betrayed by a great hope."
"If whores really wanted to be free, they ought to make a radical change in the social system which forces them to prostitute themselves. Kill their clients, plant bombs in their cars, set fire to their country houses, instead of creating a cozy little life for themselves on the side. You can see for yourself. Objectively they're confronted with the same problems as the oppressed peoples of the third world."
"On his return from Indochina, Brice
had at last become what is known as an adult, a man who no longer falls
into the trap of his own dreams."
"If you insist on not wanting to change,
if you refuse to capitulate, if you pretend to be young instead of accepting
your age, there'll soon be nothing left for you but suicide.'
Brice quoted Nietzsche: "From love
of life one ought to desire a free and conscious death without hazard
or surprise." But I tolerate only one form of suicide, that of the
scorpion which, surrounded by flames and finding no means of escape, stings
itself to death"