“Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit.”

“What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead”

“Intensity of experience is what we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more, but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad”

“perhaps it will I said perhaps it will be wonderful perhaps even though it won't be like you think perhaps that won't matter perhaps”

“What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. ... Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite determent and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted.”

“Our friends started life with too many beliefs -- the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighted down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. to work their way back to the fundamental ones -- what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? -- they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief...it is nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital.”

“to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing”