I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

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

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.