Nausea Time Quotes

According to Antoine, most of the things people do in their lives are designed to kill time. The problem is that time can never be filled up, because as soon as your distraction ends, you become bored and anxious all over again. The process of killing time can never be over, which causes Antoine a lot of pain.

Antoine's feelings of Nausea are directly connected to his experience of time. For him, time isn't just something that passes us by. It's a type of void that swallows up all of our greatest joys and accomplishments. One thing that time makes sure of is the fact that nothing lasts… especially not joy. Life is just an endless effort to stay one step ahead of time. But it's a game you can never win

Every now and then, we succeed in distracting ourselves from the devouring powers of time. But sooner or later, we'll realize that it's still eating up everything we do with our lives, destroying everything as the present turns into the past. This is a painful thing to realize, as Antoine (and probably many readers) is bound to find out.

Antoine is tortured by the thought that the present is constantly turning into the past. For him, life looks like it's just a long string of beads. He's counting them off one by one and wondering what the point of it all is. But each time he tries to "cling" to a good moment with all his heart, it slips away just like all the others.

Antoine wants to live his present-day life as though he's remembering it from the future, which makes sense when you think about it. Life can often look a lot rosier when you're looking back on it. Even the goods times seem to be better when you remember them, and not so much while you're actually living them.

As his conflict unfolds, Antoine starts to give up on the idea of trying to capture a good moment and hold onto it. Instead, he starts to accept just how pointless it is to try and fight time. The present will always turn into the past and you can't stop it. So why try?

When he sees a young couple flirting at a restaurant table, Antoine knows the two will sleep together soon. But he also figures that the young people, like everybody, need a way to kill time and distract themselves from the absurdity of human life.

Antoine has no illusions about the greatness of humanity. He knows that one day, the last human will die and the natural world will devour all of the cities and monuments that humans have spent thousands of years trying to build. How is it possible to think that humanity is meaningful when we know with certainty that one day, there will be no more humanity left?

For Antoine, it's not as if the movement from present to past is random or shapeless. According to him, there's a sort of music or "melody" to the movement of time. Its this movement that gives him hope that there might actually be something beautiful about human life, although he has a difficult time describing it outside of using the word "melody."