Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

The people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene.

The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.

The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.