Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway! ... You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.

The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.

I contemplated pride and love. All this contemplativeness. When will I be free of it?

Today I told myself that in actual fact anyone who takes an innocuous and random delight in his life is an absolute lummox.

Questions are usually more beautiful, more significant than their resolutions, which in fact never resolve them, are never sufficient to satisfy us, whereas from a question streams a wonderful fragrance.

That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls