"But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

"How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon."

"Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away."

"The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity."

"Our life is full of empty space."

"A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams."

"A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion."

"The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret."

"People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction."

"William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound."

"I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it)."

"Translation is the art of failure."

"Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another."

"Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe-with charity-that there is still room for Hope."

"He is always on the brink of suicide... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives."

"The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body."

"A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis."

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them,colorless green ideas slepp furiously."

"The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the lessI value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,without asking too many questions."

"The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast."

"Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it."

"I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly."

"I felt like poisoning a monk."

"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."

"You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day."

"Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is."

"Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear."

"He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal."

"The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns from whence he came."

"The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is."

"The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information."

"The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis."

"In the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing."

"What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss."

"From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola."

"A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks."

"But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects."

"Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness."

"What is a saint supposed to do, if not convert wolves?"

"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."

"In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames."

"Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel."

"But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit."

"The taxi driver is someone who spends all day driving in city traffic (an activity that provokes either heart attack or delirium), in constant conflict with other human drivers. Consequently, he is nervous and hates every anthropomorphic creature."

"I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed."

"If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television."

"It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party."

"I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed."

"The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless."

"The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances."