“The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).”

Every exploration is an appropriation.

Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.

One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

It is as queen of Canada that I am here. Queen of Canada and all Canadians, not just one or two ancestral strains.

Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us in different directions.

The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It’s not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it’s the resentment that settles on your face

Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

You didn’t have to wash it as often and it hid the blood stains better!

When the great Composer shall transpose all the strains of earth from the minor into the major, when the wail of nature shall give way to the glad harmony of the everlasting jubilee.

Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.