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.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them-in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

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