Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

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 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.

The work of memory collapses time.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

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