Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

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

In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.

False values begin with the worship of things.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

A good book is an education of the heart.

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.