These ways to make people buy were strange and new to us, and many bought for the sheer pleasure at first of holding in the hand and talking of something new. And once this was done, it was like opium, we could no longer do without this new bauble, and thus, though we hated the foreigners and though we knew they were ruining us, we bought their goods. Thus I learned the art of the foreigners, the art of creating in the human heart restlessness, disquiet, hunger for new things, and these new desires became their best helpers.

With some people there is such a thing as the habit of betrayal.

Many events seem to happen twice to me; even trifles, unimportant-seeming, recur, as if I were destined to live them again, time reconquered, but with added knowledge and a different outcome.

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

People never think about words, they only feel them.

Moralists have no place in an art gallery.

A family is a burial mound of its own doings and sayings.