“Human reason is beautiful and invincible.No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.It puts what should be above things as they are.It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.”

“I imagine the earth when I am no more:Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”

“Irony is the glory of slaves.”

“What is poetry which does not save nations or people?”

“You who think of us: they lived only in delusion... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!”

“And Yet the BooksAnd yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,That appeared once, still wetAs shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,And, touched, coddled, began to liveIn spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,Tribes on the march, planets in motion.“We are,” they said, even as their pagesWere being torn out, or a buzzing flameLicked away their letters. So much more durableThan we are, whose frail warmthCools down with memory, disperses, perishes.I imagine the earth when I am no more:Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”

“The survivors ran through the fields, escapingFrom themselves, knowing they wouldn't returnFor a hundred years. Before them were spreadThose quicksands where a tree changes into nothing,Into an anti-tree, where no borderlineSeparates a shape from a shape, and where,Amid thunder, the golden house of isCollapses, and the word becoming ascends.”