It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunt us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them.

Poetry can be baffling; it can refuse to unfurl all of itself to the reader. Better, I think, to sink into the sensations that a poem creates than always to worry at it like a puzzle. By its nature, poetry expresses what can’t be said in prose; it can be resistant, you can snag on it. Poetry is needed in an emergency, when ordinary ways of writing or speaking can’t get at the moment, or the feeling, or the thought.

We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams, And each to other dreams of others' dreams.

“We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is good—and that is the real theater—to transcend them in the manner of play, by means of tired games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put ‘in play,’ show up, transform, and reverse the systems which quietly order us about. As far as I am concerned, that is what I try to do in my work.”

“…I was not wild, not volcanic, I was rigid and self-protective; the form of my self-protectiveness took was exclusion: that which I feared, I ignored…”

Anyone who escapes the ordinary categories and distinctions by which we define ourselves and each other indirectly threatens the identities of other people, who are likely to react with a violent impulse to reenvisage this defector from the identity regime. By refusing the distinctions of prestige and status, you threaten to reveal their arbitrariness to the world, and those whose very being depends on those distinctions will fight to prevent that, without even knowing what they are doing.

Capitalism has facilitated democracy, fascism, state socialism, theocracy, militarism, human rights, religious revivals; it processes and transforms all social organisation into its social organisation. Every political aspiration is compatible with its productive relation. You propose the counter culture? Capital will commodify it, instigate it, reproduce it, and sell it. There is no outside of the loop.

“A certain thought refuses to leave my mind in peace: We are, hollow; we inhabit and are inhabited by echoes. We are made of words and make our echoic inner worlds—“my” world, “your” world. But we are hollow.”

You must always remember that art itself is the Great Illusion, the illusion which Madam Maya manufactures in order to hold the rest of the house of mirrors together.

He furnished his rooms -- doubtless at the expense of a few basic necessities -- with something akin to luxury. He took particular pains over the chairs -- deep, soft armchairs -- door curtains and carpets. He told me that this was his way of creating an interior that would "maintain the dignity of his tedium." In a modern-style room, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical pain.