And all that remains of them to float about Madame’s airy corpse is the delicate perfume of the holy maidens which they were in secret. We are beautiful, joyous, drunk, and free!

We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities.

He was unbelieving when he saw lovers who were lovers in the complete sense and who slept night after night in the same bed. He was quite sure their love was a fabrication or a convenience or a recompense and he did not believe in their love as love.

When they heard the shot, some five minutes after the girl had left the table, the father didn’t get up at once, but stayed there for a few seconds, paralyzed, his mouth still full of food, not daring to chew or swallow, far less to spit the food out on to his plate; and when he finally did get up and run to the bathroom, those who followed him noticed that when he discovered the blood-spattered body of his daughter and clutched his head in his hands, he kept passing the mouthful of meat from one cheek to the other, still not knowing what to do with it.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Life tailors us for a certain person and laughs when we are drawn to someone unable to love us.
All this is simple—like postage stamps.

Street of Crocodiles (Timothy & Stephen Quay, 1986) (by Muy Matrera)

It is the bruises that allow us to recognize the value of the discovery.

trying to live the precarious life of the poisonous orchids of civilization

Unhappiness always makes us expend ourselves on people who don’t matter to us.