A question asked without expecting an answer, either because the answer is already implied or because what matters is the doubt it exposes.
In The Red and the Black
My God! To be happy, to be loved, is that all?
"To be happy, to be loved, is that all?" asks for no answer, because the disappointment already contains it: after his greatest victory, Julien feels that the promised happiness amounts to very little and that ambition no longer knows what to desire.
Book I, chapter 15: The Crowing of the Rooster, Julien Sorel (in thought)
Following the maxims he had set himself, he considered his three hundred and twenty-one fellow students enemies, the most dangerous of all being Abbé Pirard. A few days later, Julien had to choose a confessor and was handed a list. Ah, my God! What do they take me for?, he thought. Do they think I don't know where I'm treading? He chose Abbé Pirard.
Book I, chapter 26: The World, or What the Rich Man Lacks, the narrator
So learning is worth nothing here? [...] My only merit lay in [...] grasping this nonsense. [...] And I was fool enough to be proud of it!
Book I, chapter 26: The World, or What the Rich Man Lacks, Julien Sorel (in thought)
What will his pretensions be, if he ever has complete power over me? Very well! I shall say like Medea: Amid so many dangers, I am left with MYSELF.
Book II, chapter 14: Thoughts of a Young Woman, Mathilde de La Mole (in thought)
if I refuse, I shall despise myself afterward. All my life I will think of this affair with some doubt, and for me such a doubt is the most humiliating of misfortunes. Was that not what I went through because of Amanda's lover? I think I would forgive myself a crime that was perfectly clear more easily; once confessed, I would not think about it anymore.
Book II, chapter 15: Will It Be a Conspiracy?, Julien Sorel (in thought)
Well then, sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a great highway. At one moment it may reflect, to your eyes, the blue of the sky, at another the filth of the mudholes on the road. Could the man who carries the mirror in his pack be accused of immorality? The mirror shows the dirt and you accuse the mirror? You should accuse the long road where the mudhole forms and, above all, the inspector of roads who lets the water stagnate and the mire accumulate.
Book II, chapter 19: The Opéra Bouffe, the narrator
After an act like that, how can I persuade her that it is she I love, solely? For, after all, I wanted to kill her out of ambition or out of love for Mathilde.
Book II, chapter 42, Julien Sorel (in thought)
Could we not spend two months together in a delightful way? Two months are a lot of days. I will never have been so happy.
Book II, chapter 43, Julien Sorel
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