You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.