“What love lays bare in me is energy.”

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

Why is it better to last than to burn?

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

Folk is bare bones music.

I feel bare. I didn’t realize I wore my secrets as armor until they were gone and now everyone sees me as I really am.

Over and over, we begin again.

Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame; He hides behind a magisterial air He own offences, and strips others’ bare.

I watch her blond head until it disappears around the bend, and I feel bare, like there’s nothing left to protect me against pain. Her absence stings worst of all.

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.