Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.

Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.

At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.

I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.

This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.

We don't catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance