Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

Music is only love looking for words.

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.