In general, one begins to play games with spaces.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of assent with nothingness, with the base and the banal.

Rather, a thick, self-woven, self-spun spiderweb in which world affairs hang strewn about like the corpses of insects sucked dry.

What he says lags endlessly far behind what we would so gladly have credited him with and believed him capable of had he remained silent.

I lay upon the bed really with the absolute certainty that, in this city of hundreds of thousands, where only one person knew me, I would not be disturbed, when there was a knock at the door.

Versailles is not too great for one who has eaten hashish nor eternity too long-lasting. And in the background of these immense dimensions of the inner adventure, of absolute duration and the immeasurable spatial realm, a wonderful, blessed humor now lingers all the more agreeably with the contingencies of the spatio-temporal world. I am endlessly aware of this humor when I find out that the kitchen at Basso's and the entire upstairs have just closed the very moment I've sat down to tuck in eternity. All the same, the feeling afterwards that all this indeed remains forever, constant, lit up, well-patronized and full of life.

And when I recall this state, I'd like to think that hashish, in relation to nature, possesses the force and power of persuasion to allow us to recapture the great squandering of one's own existence, which we savor when we're in love. For when we are in love for the first time and our existence slips like gold coins through nature's fingers, which cannot hold on to them and must lavishly spend them in order to obtain the new being, the new-born, then, without hoping or expecting a thing, she flings us with both hands full toward existence.

The path of the departed person is the soul of the conversation they led.

The subject urgently insists that the window be closed, no doubt because he feels disturbed by the noise coming from outside. I shut the window, which elicits the most appreciative thanks. Within this context there follows a speculation about the 'good deed'. "When someone has done something good, then perhaps it turns into the eye of a bird."

-walter benjamin   1931