One Way Street And Other Writings

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

What, in the end, makes advertisements superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.

to great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.

In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland’s sadness. To that person, they remain faithful.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by aeroplane.

Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance?

The child seeks his way along the half-hidden paths. Reading, he covers his ears; the book is on a table that is far too high, and one hand is always on the page. To him, the hero’s adventures can still be read in the swirling letters like figures and messages in drifting snowflakes. His breath is part of the air of the events narrated, and all the participants breathe it. He mingles with the characters far more closely than grown-ups do. He is unspeakably touched by the deeds, the words that are exchanged; and, when he gets up, he is covered over and over by the snow of his reading.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his convictions.

The language of nature is comparable to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language, but the meaning of the password is the sentry’s language itself.

Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift in seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his memetic faculty does not play a decisive role.

The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder.

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.

Our feeling, dazzled, flutters like a flock of birds in the woman’s radiance. And as birds seek refuge in the leafy recesses of a tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward movements and inconspicuous blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low in safety.

A child in his nightshirt cannot be prevailed upon to greet an arriving visitor.

Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away.

To read what was never written.’ Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use.

It is true that countless facades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often they have been in the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns.