To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

To wonder is to begin to understand.

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.

Love is exclusivity, selection.

In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.