Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.

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

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

A book is a suicide postponed.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.