The goal is to know how not-to-know.

How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.

Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.

If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.

You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.

It's autumn and everybody feels like a disembodied spirit then.

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods.