Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

There is no language without deceit.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

...Life is nothing but trading smells.