Serotonin Quotes
"Nicotine is a perfect drug, a simple, hard drug that brings no joy, defined entirely by a lack, and by the cessation of that lack."
"The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen."
"It isn’t hard to change your first name, although I don’t mean from a bureaucratic point of view – hardly anything is possible from a bureaucratic point of view."
"The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence."
"Love for men is therefore an end, an accomplishment, and not, as for women, a beginning, a birth; that’s what you need to bear in mind."
"In France, abandoning your family is not a crime."
"Their death had been quick, the police officer kindly assured me; quick but not instant – it was easy to tell by their positions on the bed that they had wanted to hold hands until the end, but they had suffered from convulsions in their death throes, and their hands had parted."
"No one ever discovered how they had got hold of the pills; my mother had deleted her navigation history on the home computer."
"Obviously, the police officer told me, if I really wanted to they could easily trace the order, nothing is ever totally deleted in the cloud; it was possible, but was it necessary?"
"I didn’t know that two people could be buried in the same coffin."
"The priest had irritated me a little during his sermon, glibly talking about the magnificence of human love as a prelude to the even greater magnificence of divine love."
"When he is faced with genuine love a priest keeps his trap shut."
"Their level of communication was truly astonishing, I’m sure I witnessed at least two clearly demonstrable cases of telepathy."
"My hotel room, I was immediately aware, would guide me in that second direction: it was genuinely tiny, ten square metres in total."
"Was I capable of being happy in solitude? I didn’t think so."
"The only difficulty with living in a hotel is that you have to leave your room – and therefore your bed – every day so that the housekeeper can do her job."
"But I could help them, give them a clue by turning over the little information card hooked on the door handle."
"I had said a week as I might have said anything else, my only plan had been to free myself from a toxic relationship that was killing me."
"Captorix worked by increasing the secretion of serotonin."
"The impressive increase in homelessness had gradually made Western society relax its criteria in this field."
"Leaving Rue Bobillot and turning into Rue de la Butte-aux-Cailles meant leaving the universe of ordinary consumers and entering a world of militant creperies and alternative bars."
"He had something of the tree-hugger about him, I said to myself at first glance, with his shoulder-length curly hair starting to be invaded by threads of white."
"The truth is that we knew nothing, or practically nothing, about the long-term consequences of genetic plant manipulations."
"Monsanto must have seemed to them like a company that was about as honourable as the CIA."
"The newspaper Libération was not yet read only by casual theatre workers but also by a part (albeit a decreasing one) of their audience."
"I wasn’t all that impressed by the play – but I was impressed by Claire, who emanated a kind of icy eroticism throughout the whole performance."
"You have to watch out for the holiday period, it’s often fatal for depressives."
"My job is basically to stop people from killing themselves; well, for a while, for as long as possible."
"You’re missing a single person and everything is depopulated."
"You’re missing a single person and everything is dead, the world is dead and you’re dead."
"Society was a machine for destroying love."
"I knew happiness and the things which constitute it, and I know very well what it is about."
"The whole of his creation bears the stamp of approximation and failure, when it isn’t meanness pure and simple."
"People manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning, ineluctably, with the odd mistake, a few errors when there’s sickness in the mix, but it goes on turning to the end, to the final second."
"The confrontation lasted a few minutes, at least three, more probably five or ten, then my hands started trembling and I realised that I was incapable of pulling the trigger, I was nothing but a pussy, a sad and insignificant pussy, and an ageing one at that."
"It is to satisfy your every desire that they come from the ends of the earth."
"It isn’t the future but the past that kills you, that comes back to torment and undermine you, and effectively ends up killing you."
"It’s from that moment that my behaviour starts to escape me, that I am reluctant to assign a meaning to it."
"Things were so similar that it was almost becoming oppressive."
"I realised that at this distance she wouldn’t be able to see me, but if, on the other hand, I had turned on the lights in the restaurant she would have suspected something unusual."
"Everything exists or asks to exist, which is why situations come together, sometimes bringing powerful emotional configurations, and a destiny is fulfilled."
"The murder of a four-year-old inevitably provokes an intense emotion in the media so I could expect considerable investigative resources to be deployed."
"I had the foresight to bring a plastic bag into which I poured the cigarette butts that I had held between my teeth."
"The systematic recording of DNA in the absence of a crime had never been voted for so in some respects we lived in a free country."
"The key to success seemed to me to lie in rapid execution: in less than a minute after firing, I could have left La Rotonde once and for all."
"I understood Camille’s son, that I was able to put myself in his place, and that identification gave me the right to kill him."
"The first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype."
"I don’t think that contrary forces, the forces that tried to keep me on track for murder, had much to do with morality; it was more an anthropological matter."
"Camille would suffer, she would suffer enormously; I would have to wait at least six months before resuming contact."
"I felt I was about to accomplish the perfect liberating and unique shot, the most important shot in my life, the only goal underlying my months of training."
"I was trembling violently when I got to my feet, my vision blurred with tears, and I understood that it was over, that I wouldn’t shoot."
"Slowly, very slowly, funereally slowly, I unscrewed the pieces of the Steyr Mannlicher, which fit neatly into their foam rubber holdings."
"There are areas of the human psyche that remain little-known because they haven’t been much explored."
"Even when you plunge into true night, polar night, the concept or the memory of the sun remains."
"The ancestral pride of the railway workers, the ancestral pride of respect for the timetable, so powerful and so rooted in the early twentieth century."
"An atmosphere of general catastrophe always alleviates individual catastrophe – that’s probably why suicides are so rare in wartime."
"The truth is that it’s been tested at 20, nothing beyond that, and I don’t really want to take the risk."
"Unlike natural serotonin, serotonin produced through the medium of Captorix inhibits the synthesis of testosterone."
"I’d expect it to be very low: unlike natural serotonin, serotonin produced through the medium of Captorix inhibits the synthesis of testosterone."
"In the end it’s not sorrow that will kill you, not directly."
"I had no hopes and I was fully aware that I had nothing to hope for."
"I was confronted all through my life with cruel and repeated loss – including the loss of my own sons."
"I had entered an endless night, and yet there remained, deep within me, there remained something less than a hope."
"I would get there, I felt I was about to get there: it was the home stretch."
"It doesn’t create or transform; it interprets. It renders fleeting what was definitive; it renders contingent what was ineluctable."
"Death imposes itself in the end: the molecular armour cracks, the process of decomposition resumes its course."
"I could have made a woman happy. Well, two; I have said which ones."