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.

What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

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

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

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