Quote collection
334 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"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."
"Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living."
"The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country."
"The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful."
"All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them."
"As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight."
"It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth."
"My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read."
"I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out."
"We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights."
"If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it."
"In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem."
"That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated."
"It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death."
"I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive."
"The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well."
"Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker."
"The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables."
"Canada is so far away it hardly exists."