"Memory really matters...only if it enables us to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become."

"In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices."

"Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute."

"When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy."

"What matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial."

"The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies."

"We all have a secret wound which we are fighting to avenge."

"Again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering."

"I've been in love for five hundred million years…"

"The cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in."

"In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins."

"The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins."

"Although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic."

"But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her."

"...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness."

"If the spark doesn't come, that's a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love."

"I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses."

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."

"Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise."

"And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music, I know it is to be sought in cemeteries: the musicians hide in the tombs; from grave to grave flute trills, harp chords answer one another."

"From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey through forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the center of an empty horizon."

"And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."

"Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find."

"Fantasy is a place where it rains."

"When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible."

"Her friends' lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel and maroon."

"Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times."

"... we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears."

"The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions."

"You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?"

"The dream of being invisible . . . When I find myself in an environment where I can enjoy the illusion of being invisible, I am really happy."

"We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses."

"The more time passed, the less happened. The more they felt something must happen, the more the bailiffs realized they had to do something but the less they understood what it was."

"With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig."

"No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form."

"The fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's."

"If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance."

"A poor writer is one who names rather than represents."