One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

There is no original truth, only original error.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Man is an imagining being.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.