165 quotes found
“Art is fire plus algebra.”
“Paradise will be a kind of library”
“Democracy is an abuse of statistics.”
“I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror”
“Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within”
“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endles...”
“Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the cru...”
“Let not the rash marble riskgarrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,in many words recallingname, renown, events, birthplace.All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.Let not the marble ...”
“There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it...”
“My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and...”
“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
“Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.”
“There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditorythe colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elementsthe sun, the water a...”
“Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the...”
“We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.”
“Puis il rflchit: la ralit ne concide habituellement pas avec les prvisions; avec une logique perverse, il en dduisit que prvoir un dtail circonstanciel, c'est empcher que celui-ci se ralise. Fidle ...”
“It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.”
“The three of them knew it. She was Kafkas mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafkas friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the fri...”
“Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore an...”
“It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.”
“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more in...”
“He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.”
“I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words....”
