... [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.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

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

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

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.

Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.