But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.

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I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.

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Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

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Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

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Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

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The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.

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Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

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I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.

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As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.

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Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.

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