"It's shocking, the positions, the unchecked simplicity with which one mind contrives to fertilize another! Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn't know."

"God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men."

"Few of them made it to thirty. Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees. Childhood ended as fast as wolf cubs grow. One had to hurry, to get on with life before the sun went down, before the first snow."

"And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe? That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!"

"He managed to come into the world at what was still a fitting time. All that was to pass passed in this house. Not in housing projects, not in furnished but empty quarters, among unknown neighbors on fifteenth floors that student field trips rarely reach."

"After every war someone has to tidy up. Things won't pick themselves up, after all.Someone has to shove the rubble to the roadsides so the carts loaded with corpses can get by."

"We call it a grain of sand but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect or apt."

"The window has a wonderful view of a lake, but the view doesn't view itself. It exists in this world colorless, shapeless, soundless, odorless, and painless."

"Show me your little poem and I'll tell you why it wasn't written any earlier or later than it was.Oh no, you've got me wrong. Keep your funny piece of paper with its scribbles. All I need for my ends is your layer of dirt and the long gone smell of burning."

"Those who knew what this was all about must make way for those who know little. And less than that. And at last nothing less than nothing."

"Millennia have passed since you first called me archaeology. I no longer require your stone gods, your ruins with legible inscriptions. Show me your whatever and I'll tell you who you were."

"Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light."

"On this third planet from the sun among the signs of bestiality a clear conscience is Number One."

"There's no life that couldn't be immortal if only for a moment.Death always arrives by that very moment too late.In vain it tugs at the knob of the invisible door. As far as you've come can't be undone."

"My dreams — even they're not as populous as they should be. They hold more solitude than noisy crowds."

"And how can we talk of order overall when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting! And dust blowing all over the steppes as if they hadn't been partitioned! And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves, that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters! Only what is human can truly be foreign."

"My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses."

"My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs. My apologies to great questions for small answers."

"I know I won't be justified as long as I live, since I myself stand in my own way. Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, then labor heavily so that they may seem light."

"Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me how little now remains, one first person sing., temporarily declined in human form, just now making such a fuss about a blue umbrella left yesterday on a bus."

"I felt age within me. Distance. The futility of wandering. Torpor. I looked back setting my bundle down. I looked back not knowing where to set my foot. Serpents appeared on my path, spiders, field mice, baby vultures. They were neither good nor evil now — every living thing was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic."

"The going's rough, and so we need the laugh of bright incisors, molars of goodwill. Our times are still not safe and sane enough for faces to show ordinary sorrow."

"Something doesn't start at its usual time. Something doesn't happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared."

"My siblings died the day I left for dry land and only one small bone recalls that anniversary in me."

"They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone. They don't have to be seen while sailing on."

"I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds — a split second's enough for them to start being something else. Their trademark: they don't repeat a single shape, shade, pose, arrangement."

"Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan. I'm drowning in debts up to my ears. I'll have to pay for myself with my self, give up my life for my life."

"If there are angels they must, I hope, find this convincing, this merriment dangling from terror, not even crying Save me Save me since all of this takes place in silence."

"We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself."

"For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls."

"I shake my memory. Maybe something in its branches that has been asleep for years will start up with a flutter.No. Clearly I'm asking too much. Nothing less than one whole second."

"The counting of weekdays would inevitably seem to be a senseless activity; dropping letters in the mailbox a whim of foolish youth; the sign "No Walking On The Grass" a symptom of lunacy."

"I believe in the refusal to take part. I believe in the ruined career. I believe in the wasted years of work. I believe in the secret taken to the grave."

"I lost a few goddesses while moving south to north and also some gods while moving east to west."

"Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different. Or a little bit different — which is to say, completely different."

"He has only just learned to tell dreams from waking; only just realized that he is he; only just whittled with his hand né fin a flint, a rocket ship; easily drowned in the ocean's teaspoon, not even funny enough to tickle the void: sees only with his eyes; hears only with his ears; his speech's personal best is the conditional; he uses his reason to pick holes in reason. In short, he's next to to one, but his head's full of freedom, omniscience and the Being beyond his foolish meat — did you ever!"

"He's no end of fun, for all you say. Poor little beggar. A human, if ever we saw one."

"So he's got to have happiness, he's got to have truth, too, he's got to have eternity — did you ever!"

"This adult male. This person on earth. Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood pumped by ten ounces of heart. This object took three billion years to emerge."

"He feels like a handle broken off a jug, but the jug doesn't know it's broken and keeps going to the well."

"Whose side are you on?" "I don't know." "This is a war, you've got to choose." "I don't know." "Does your village still exist?" "I don't know." "Are those your children?" "Yes."

"Yes, she loved him very much. Yes, he was born that way. Yes, she was standing by the prison wall that morning. Yes, she heard the shots. You may regret not having brought a camera, a tape recorder. Yes, she has seen such things."

"Yes, the memory still moves her. Yes, just a little tired now. Yes, it will pass. You may get up. Thank her. Say good-bye. Leave, passing by the new arrivals in the hall."

"Within him, there's awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy. God of humor, do something about him, OK? God of humor, do something about him today."

"I'm sorry that my voice was hard. Look down on yourselves from the stars, I cried, look down on yourselves from the stars. They heard me and lowered their eyes."

"Born. So he was born, too. Born like everyone else. Like me, who will die. The son of an actual woman. A new arrival from the body's depths. A voyager to Omega."

"Our stockpile of antiquity grows constantly, it's overflowing, reckless squatters jostle for a place in history, hordes of sword fodder, Hector's nameless extras, no less brave than he, thousands upon thousands of singular faces, each the first and last for all time, in each a pair of inimitable eyes. How easy it was to live not knowing this, so sentimental, so spacious."

"I knock at the stone's front door. "It's only me, let me come in.""I don't have a door," says the stone."

"I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out..."

"I, the solitary fish, a fish apart (apart at least from the tree fish and the stone fish), write, at isolated moments, a tiny fish or two whose glittering scales, so fleeting, may only be the dark's embarrassed wink."