“No one should be subjected to force over things which belonged to him.”

“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”

“His secret name, which belongs to me, and to him, and to no one else.”

“No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.”

“In the literary machine that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over.”

“What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet.”