Great Throughts Treasury

"The countryside liberates its own distant points. Everywhere else, distance is a living relationship. Here, no such thing. No relationship, no lasting exchange. It only exists in and for itself, knowing only itself, and you reach the boundary of your powerlessness of human powerlessness."

"Playing the hand without you, existing without you: not them. The luck of having you. What reaches you, alien says he. The people, their country. You make them happy. They could not be them. They only marvelous, what luck, and you just perfect, dressed in light. For certain, you save them from guards without bodies these guards in goose step who fall into step with them. New world so new that you don't know if you like it. But where, if that reaches you it suits you to be human. And as dressed in light it suits you better to be in your human skin."

"Close your doors women, bitter sleep will fill your nerves, water and sand wore away the trace of your step, nothing belongs to you. Far away the few glimmerings of stars, opaque, the earth around the black dwellings shelter your respite. Close your doors I am the guardian: nothing belongs to you. But I’ll barely sing so that your pain not impinge on your sleep; Peace to you, mothers, wives, the blood-drinking tyrant will be dust in your winnowing baskets. I walk on the mountain where approaching spring puts scented herbs: All of you who listen to me, when dawn softens, I’ll come and wash your thresholds. And my songs will stifle time’s ululations. Do not ask if the wind trailing along the peaks fans a hearth; if it is a bonfire if it is a poor man’s fire or a sentinel’s signal. Fabulous women who close your doors, still still soaked in night, dream on. I walk, I walk: the words I carry on my tongue make a strange report."

"A fire had been lit, and it would never be extinguished; its bloody flames would not stop until their sinister glow had been thrown across the entire nation."

"A man is likewise form and expression, a written sign thrown unto boundless matter, an undifferentiated word of what is. I've therefore been created in the image of the inscriptions that, as a child, I used to project unto my bits of bone, stone, wood, and iron, probably even in the image of a single one of their words, a single one of their letters."

"Act as if your death was for tomorrow, but perform your duties as if you were to live forever."

"At present, [in the desert] an exasperating clarity reigns. The sky has become less visible than water in a jar. Black peaks, spines of granite, a twisted tree are sculpted in this atmosphere basted with reflections. All that remains: a countryside of imperishable contours."

"Beware that the one who reads is the same as the book, the same as what is read, the same as the speaker and the same as what is spoken without being the word."

"Humiliation, slavery, fear have perverted us to the bone; we no longer look like men... . Men must be granted the respect due to them."

"Respect the earth, and it will respect you. It works, it will reward you a hundredfold."