Love dies because its birth was an error.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism