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.

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.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.