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

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

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

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.

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.

The distracted person, too, can form habits.