Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

The work of memory collapses time.