Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance. – Walter Benjamin
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. – Walter Benjamin
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text. – Walter Benjamin
The book borrower…proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures…as by his failure to read these books. – Walter Benjamin
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart. – Elizabeth Bowen