High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor . . .

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.