... [L]ess than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about those institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, the factory, let's say, no longer reveals these relationships. Therefore something has to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.

The work of memory collapses time.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

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

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.