The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

Whence, if ever, shall come the actualityOf a voice speaking the mind's knowing,The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,When in the white bed all things are made.

What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

Major writing is to say that which has been seen, so that it need never be said again so that which has been seen increases, changes in reality, in being.

I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?

Each minute bursts in the burning room,The great globe reels in the solar fire,Spinning the trivial and unique away.(How all things flash! How all things flare!)What am I now that I was then?May memory restore again and againThe smallest color of the smallest day:Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.

I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.

How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!Have passed at full speed like trains which never stoppedThere where I stood and waited, hardly aware,How little I knew, or which of them was the oneTo mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.

Love is the tact of every good, The only warmth, the only peace.

What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.