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.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

You can always be quoted.

whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.