Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. - Roland Barthes

…once can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales.

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

I waver — in the dark — between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I’m unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together — and the conviction that deep down, in actual fact, I am continually, all the time, unhappy since maman’s death.