'Do you see whither you bend your gaze, that it is to the earth, that it is to the pit, that it is to these wretched laws of ours, the laws of the dead, and that it is not to the laws of the gods that you look?'

'After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile, and I saw that all the things which were the cause or object of my fear had nothing of good or bad in themselves, except insofar as [my] mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, all others being rejected—whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity.'

'… to avoid poetry's innate tendency toward the sacrilegious.'

'… A regional identity built on its own denial, on the idea of an unqualified normality…'

'Can you find me? Can I hide from you?'

'I usually talk in sentences on bass.'

'So now the routine…'

'… this is why Montaigne tends to annotate his books, underlining passages and writing at the end the date on which he read them, or the impression that they made on him in that moment. This is not the art of the critic, nor even the art of the writer, it is merely a dialogue with pencil in hand; at the beginning he is far from any desire to set down anything coherent himself. But little by little the solitude of his room begins to act on him; the silent voices of the books demand a response ever more urgently, and, in order to master the run of his thoughts, he writes them down.'

'We look at trees and at television sets.'