Idiot. Above her head was the only stable point in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business. A moment later the couple went off -- he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter -- their first and last encounter -- with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?

A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.

You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).