"Il filtrait l'univers et ne retenait rien."

"Le regard est un choix. Celui qui regarde décide de se fixer sur telle chose et donc forcément d'exclure de son attention le reste de son champ de vision. C'est un quoi le regard, qui est l'essence de la vie, est d'abord un refus."

"Alors, contraint et forcé, l'être sort de sa torpeur. A le question affreuse et informulable qui l'a assailli, il cherche et trouve mille réponse inadéquates. Il se met à marcher, à parler, à adopter cent attitudes inutiles par lesquelles il espère s'en sortir. Non seulement il ne s'en sort pas, mais il empire son cas. Plus il parle, moins il comprend, et plus il marche, plus il fait du surplace. Très vite, il regrettera sa vie larvaire, sans oser l'avouer. Il existe pourtant ds êtres qui ne subissent pas la loi de l'évolution, qui ne rencontrent pas d'accident fatal. Ce sont les légumes cliniques. Les médecins se penchent sur leur cas. En vérité, ils sont ce que nous voudrions être. C'est la vie qui devrait être tenue pour un mauvais fonctionnement."

-Amélie Nothomb, Métaphysique des tubes

"If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all is objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded."

"Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject."

"The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing."

"The symptom: a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear, for its strayed subject is huddled outside the paths of desire. Sublimation, on the contrary, is nothing else than the possibility of naming the pre-nominal, the pre-objectal, which are in fact only a trans-nominal, a trans-objectal...The abject is edged with sublime."

-Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror