I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.

The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

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