... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

I head a bitterness that hadn't been there before. Something was changing inside him. He'd had enough of following the rules.

I treat my thoughts like an old person treats their valuables: I cannot for the life of me proceed to throwing them out.

He dropped his head and kissed her. He kisses her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing.

If you can't take a small loss, sooner or later you will take the mother of all losses.

Everything is good . . . as long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses they run in span.

[ René Lévesque] didn't understand why things do collapse. It's usually a very banal reason why things do collapse. It's not a grand reason, why they collapse economically, at least in the West.

AIDS is a state of mind, not a disease.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.