“Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were 'Ah, the cows...”

“The more I pursue God, the more I realize that he is inherently different from us. He does not protect his possessions and hoard his toys. He does not look forways to make us jealous of him, though he, the God Most High, is jealous for us.”

“It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.”

“Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.”

“God draws near to the brokenhearted. He leans toward those who are suffering. He knows what it feels like to be wounded and abandoned.”

“There are silences harder to take back than words.”

“By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.”