One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness.

The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.

Lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life.

As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.

....the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the day two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.

Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.

Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul.

Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody.

An event may be small and insignificant in its origin , and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.

How can one not succumb and allow one's courage to fail when everything is shut tight, when all meaningful things are walled up, and when you constantly knock against bricks, as against the walls of a prison?

Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.

This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father.

And one's wandering proved as sterile and pointless as the excitement produced by a close study of pornographic albums.