I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").

I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.