“Language transcends us and yet we speak.”

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it… If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one’s own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.

The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary.

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.

The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.

Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful but also when it comes to happiness.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.

To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in the world.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

Language is never innocent.

Tend to be people who didn’t take S.A.T.s, or first-time voters, or people with English as a second language.

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

It feels wonderful to be go back to the 1940s and recreate the whole era through my clothes, voice and body language.

Page 61: No matter where I go in the world, although I can’t speak any foreign language.