Retold, my dream is nothing; dreamt, it was terrible.

I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind.

It's enough that if I am rich in anything, it is in perplexities rather then in certaintes.

To think is to forget.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

To think, analyze and invent are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence.

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.