It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

We all have appointments with the past.

Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.