L’Orphelin:

Je cours le long des routes, je cours,
j’ai le coeur affolé;
mon meilleur jour, ce sera le jour
où quelqu’un me dira: assez!

Et penser que c’est pour tout de bon!
Et dire que c’est la vie!
Je l’interroge, elle répond:
Nenni!

Les autres ont toujours leur espoir
qui se détache un peu.
Moi, ça fait du noir sur noir,
ou bien du noir sur du bleu.

Je vous souhaite des rêves à n’en plus finir
et l’envie furieuse d’en réaliser quelques uns.
Je vous souhaite d’aimer ce qu’il faut aimer
et d’oublier ce qu’il faut oublier.
Je vous souhaite des silences.
Je vous souhaite des chants d’oiseaux au réveil
et des rires d’enfants.
Je vous souhaite de résister à l’enlisement, à l’indifférence,
aux vertus négatives de notre époque.
Je vous souhaite surtout d’être vous.

Total abstinence is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an extent. In my passion for it, I even carry it so far as to totally abstain from total abstinence itself.

Many people think that history is a dull subject. Dull? Is it “dull” that Jesse James once got bitten on the forehead by an ant, and at first it didn’t seem like anything, but then the bite got worse and worse, so he went to a doctor in town, and the secretary told him to wait, so he sat down and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally he got to see the doctor, and the doctor put some salve on it? You call that dull?

I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.