Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
Solitude was corrupting me.
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
There was no Lo to behold.
My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.