The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

Everything has its poetry. 94

It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102

Figure, movement. Everything happens, says Pascal, from figure and movement. To say in this case that everything happens from movement, for every figure is no more than the lingering trace of a movement that has already ceased. Thus the letters that I am forming now, for example, are only the pen's lingering trace of the movement of my hand.

Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes

Before you use a fancy word, make room for it.

Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.

The voice is a human sound which nothing inanimate can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. It is not merely so much air, but air modulated and impregnated with life.

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.