Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.