“Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk.”

“A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.”

“But they bear the burden of being unpopular as proof of their importance - and these eminences turn the suspicion that less elevated customers are careful to disguise as courtesy into naked contempt and disdain. All the people one doesn't need right now are - for the person who will need them in a year's time - no more than air which he breathes but doesn't need to see.”

“And in the evening concealed fluorescent tubes light the room so evenly that it is no longer illuminated, it is a pool of luminosity.”

“Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite.”

“Only on Sundays do you come across political scout troops with sandals, walking sticks, and knives. In the woods they do round dances, they rave about nature, and have big brawls with each other. It's a strange, baffling young generation. It covet's the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, but not his shy piety and love of nature.”

“The world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power. The earth has lived through several evolutionary stages - but following always natural laws. It is presently experiencing a new one, which follows constructive, conscious, and no less elemental laws. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat.”