Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.
It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.
Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.
A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny’s house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.
I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.
They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.
You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.
In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
The end of exile is the end of being.
Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.
There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.
The kind of power mothers have is enormous. Take the skyline of Istanbul – enormous breasts, pathetic little willies, a final revenge on Islam. I was so scared I had to crouch in the bottom of the boat when I saw it.
He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.
My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor’s on the very day.
A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.
The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.
Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.
At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.
The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.