“i heard on their lips the language of passion, of betrayal and jealousy, and sometimes despair - languages with which I was all too familiar.”

“I was in the habit of calling a kiss a peck. Bulkaen had said “a smack.” As erotic language, such as we use in dalliance, is a kind of secretion, a concentrated juice that flows from the lips only in moments of the most intense emotion, of plaint, as this language is, in other words, the essential expression of passion, each pair of lovers has its own peculiar language, a language which has a perfume, an odor sui generis which belongs only to that couple… intimacy… the secret rites of a deep love.”

“I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only come up upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream. I call these languages, languages of the body.”

“I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.”

“I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb.”

“History. Language. Passion. Custom. All these things determine what men say, think, and do. These are the hidden puppet-strings from which all men hang.”