“Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.”

Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress.

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

I used the word ‘prose’ in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

It seemed to me that I was coming out of a suffocating nightmare and that the low clouds flying before the wind were the shreds of an evil dream.

One’s life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards. Its intensity stays the same; and, d’you know, it’s most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away.

The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.

The water rose further and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.

I see all this talent, all this…this energy and brightness and…potential. Yes. Potential. And I cannot for the life of me see how you can be content to live this tiny life.

What’s so great about brightness? My flashlight has it. It can’t help us rid ourselves of our suffering.

It’s an effulgence of the mind. It’s a brightness that is truly sensitive and accepting. It’s an ability to accept life as it is.

When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what’s left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are.

Put a very clever man next to a genius, his brightness will immediately turn to dullness!

Deep within, I still exist; a brighter, happy me. Just look beyond my outer casing.