Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things

We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.

I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!