Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma.

Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.

The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.

One can speak of an alterity of desire - a paradigm defined outside the tired, tacitly accepted regime, but one comes up short when attempting to posit a framework of desire beyond available, known desires.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.