If A Writer Is Convinced That He

I Live In My House As I Live Inside My Skin: I Know More Beautiful, More Ample, More Sturdy And More Picturesque Skins: But It Would Seem To Me Unnatural To Exchange Them For Mine.

Conquering Matter Is To Understand It, And Understanding Matter Is Necessary To Understanding The Universe And Ourselves: And That Therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, Which Just During Those Weeks We Were Learning To Unravel, Was Poetry.

Even In This Place One Can Survive, And Therefore One Must Want To Survive, To Tell The Story, To Bear Witness; And That To Survive We Must Force Ourselves To Save At Least The Skeleton, The Scaffolding, The Form Of Civilization. We Are Slaves, Deprived Of Every Right, Exposed To Every Insult, Condemned To Certain Death, But We Still Possess One Power, And We Must Defend It With All Our Strength For It Is The Last — The Power To Refuse Our Consent.

The Butterfly's Attractiveness Derives Not Only From Colors And Symmetry: Deeper Motives Contribute To It. We Would Not Think Them So Beautiful If They Did Not Fly, Or If They Flew Straight And Briskly Like Bees, Or If They Stung, Or Above All If They Did Not Enact The Perturbing Mystery Of Metamorphosis: The Latter Assumes In Our Eyes The Value Of A Badly Decoded Message, A Symbol, A Sign.

I Beg The Reader Not To Go In Search Of Messages. It Is A Term That I Detest Because It Distresses Me Greatly, For It Forces On Me Clothes That Are Not Mine, Which In Fact Belong To A Human Type That I Distrust; The Prophet, The Soothsayer, The Seer. I Am None Of These; I'm A Normal Man With A Good Memory Who Fell Into A Maelstrom And Got Out Of It More By Luck Than By Virtue, And Who From That Time On Has Preserved A Certain Curiosity About Maelstroms Large And Small, Metaphorical And Actual.