My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

All writing is dreaming

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.