The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things.
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel.
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.
Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
I can’t get to know you” means “I shall never know what you really think of me.” I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.
A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. ‘I shall be yours,’ she told him, ‘when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.’ But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.
It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.
I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.
The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character.
The other’s body was divided: on one side, the body proper – skin, eyes – tender, warm; and on the other side, the voice – abrupt, reserved, subject to fits of remoteness, a voice which did not give what the body gave. Or further: on one side, the soft, warm, downy. adorable body. and on the other, the ringing, well-formed. worldly voice – always the voice.
Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
Justice is always ready to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without a second thought.
Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book – Stubbornness, secrecy.