« We do not aspire to eternity, if not to the one of the moment. We do not wish to be immortal, but we have the capacity to be timeless as long as all ages of life remain present in us and we refuse to let ourselves go—I renew a wish made throughout this book by doubting that it has the slightest chance of being granted— to cut out time. As is often the case, it is a child who asks the simple question - and yet it causes me a slight vertigo: "Will today be yesterday, tomorrow?" »

« A BIG CHAGRIN An old-year word. I think I have never heard him come out of the mouths of my patients. Too steeped in childhood time? We didn't admit it then, his sorrow, and even we could deny it when our mother, believing we guessed us - she was wrong sometimes and we did not want to be comforted by what belonged to us - leaned towards us with care: "Oh, the great sorrow!" Who dares to talk about heartache today? Rather, to mitigate the shock, "love disappointment", when it is not, in those who believe that the words of psychoanalysis go deeper, "anxiety of separation", "work of mourning", "loss of object". If, however, I heard him once utter the word "chagrin" by a man who had just been unceremoniously driven away by his companion. An old man. Perhaps that is why he was not ashamed to say that word from childhood. When I asked him what led him to come to see me, his answer was: "I am grieving, I am in pain." I have not forgotten this "in." In prison, with his only cellmate his sorrow. His grief as an abandoned child - that we don't count on him to moan! -, his sorrow as an old man who dreads to see his life reduced like a skin of sorrow and to die alone in the world. »

« Every year spent in high school as a student, I had a "best friend", the one who was taken home and who took you home in turn, in a succession of back and forth, as if we were never to leave each other, and yet we leave the following year. `...` These one-year friendships were forged and unravelled, almost on their own, as sudden and unpredictable in their birth as in their erasure. »