To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.

Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

A story? No. No stories, never again.

But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.

The less manifest the work, the stronger: as though a secret law demanded it always be hidden in what it shows, thus showing what must remain hidden, only showing it, in the end, by dissimulation.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Love is not the absence of logicbut logic examined and recalculatedheated and curved to fitinside the contours of the heart

Reading renew the mind.

She really wants to be my friend, I realize, and suddenly I feel very sorry for her. She doesn't know what a terrible thing it is she's asking for.

Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.

God requires his people to shine as lights in the world. It is not merely the ministers who are required to do this, but every disciple of Christ. Their conversation should be heavenly.

Love is, in its essence, a free, formless strand of luminosity.

Just as the thought of fire does not warm the body, so faith without love does not actualize the light of spiritual knowledge in the soul.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

Most good things come with the risk of something bad.

All I ever wanted Was to know that you were dreaming.