It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.

To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.

Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.