What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.

It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not wholly) relieve it. I must never forget it... I want sensuality and sensitivity, both... Let me never deny that... I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments.