Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.

... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.