“For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.”

“It was not possible to think except with one’s brain, no one could stand outside himself in order to check the functioning of his inner processes.”

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”

“Come, let us hasten to a higher planeWhere dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,Their indices bedecked from one to nCommingled in an endless Markov chain!I'll grant thee random access to my heart,Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,And in our bound partition never part.Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,A root or two, a torus and a node:The inverse of my verse, a null domain.- Love and Tensor Algebra”

“Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious. . . . Space is, after all, solid, monolithic. . . . Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature.”

“As more and more norms disappear from social praxis, literature faces ever-growing difficulties. Its predicament is beginning to resemble that of a child who has discovered that his incredibly understanding parents will let him break with impunity all his toys, indeed everything in the house. The artist cannot create specific prohibitions for himself in order to attack them later in his work; the prohibitions must be real, and hence independent of the writer's choices. And since the relativization of cultural norms has not so far been able to disturb the given characteristics of human biology, that is where writers today seek the still perceptible points of resistance--which is why literature is preoccupied with the theme of sex.”

“Such labor follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon epicycles...”