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

If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . .

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.