The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.

In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.

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