“The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.”

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

Life itself is a quotation.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I’m from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom.

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.

Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present behind all the arts.

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.