'… the man who is to give you the poison has been telling me for some time… that I should warn you to talk as little as possible. People get heated when they talk, he says, and one should not be heated when taking the poison, as those who do must sometimes drink it two or three times.'

'Take no notice of him; only let him be prepared to administer it twice or, if necessary, three times.'

Words that transit staff use for describing pauses buses take on their routes:

'wait', 'hold', 'burn', 'dwell'

'…never better than natural…'

'…inimical to all attempts to sow the seeds of the new, to engage in daring experiments, to desire freely.'

'…so that it matters not only what some I or other says but that it is some particular I who desires in some specific place to say it. If my counting fails to matter, I am mad. It is being uncounted—being left out, as if my story were untellable—that makes what I say (seem) perverse, that makes me cold. The surmise that we have become unable to count one another, to count for one another, is philosophically a surmise that we have lost the capacity to think, that we are stupified. I call this condition living our skepticism.'

'…writing as a message from prison…'

'Who would dare reproach us for making use of this life and world which constitute our horizon?'

'The young person has become an outcast, is skeptical about all customs and concepts; now he knows: in every age things were different; it does not matter what you are.'

'Self-understanding for Montaigne is dialogue with self. It is a questioning addressed to the opaque being he is and awaits a response from. It is like "essaying" or "experimenting on" himself. He has in view a questioning without which reason's purity would be illusory and in the end impure. Some are amazed that he should want to speak about even the details of his mood and temperament. It is because for him every doctrine, when it is separated from what we do, threatens to be mendacious; and he imagined a book in which for once there would be expressed not only ideas but also the very life in which they appear and which modifies their meaning.'