“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.”

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Every man should be capable of all ideas.

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

A clamor for ‘family values’ requires deliberate blindness to the abuses that occur within families.

So far as one can tell, from what William Jame called “a certain blindness” in perceiving the vitalities of others.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.

Envy-Thy art blindness.

They even came to raise the methods of slaughter to the rank of “science”… We would not (On ne saurait”, Fr.) imagine a more extraordinary moral blindness!