Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms.
For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.
In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.
I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
Time is the substance of which we are made.
I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the “vain and superstitious habit” of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one’s hand.
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
Canada is so far away it hardly exists.
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.
Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.