Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place. For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.