Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.