“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.”

“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 worst possible sexual education: a taboo imposed by the Catholic church plus romantic literature elevating love to unreal heights plus the obscene language of my peers. After all, I was nearly born in the nineteenth century, and I have no tender feelings for it.”

“I was not meant to live anywhere except in Paradise.Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound. When the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries.”

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

“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.”

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