Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.