“What love lays bare in me is energy.”

If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a “weakness” or an “absurdity”: it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

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

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.

The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.

It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.

As if some dreadful fate would overcome us if we were to face the pure light of truth and lay bare our fearful clinging to illusion.

And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.

I wouldn’t have believed it. I still barely do, truthfully. I’m so continually fortunate that I keep coming across these smart, interesting, creative people who pick me. It’s just stupendous.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

From ages 10 to 12 or so, I barely remember anything.

Strip me to my bare core.