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.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

History breaks down into images, not into stories.

We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.