“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Ch. 28 : Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, p. 427
Context: Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou, were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old and die, and new men and women live and love and die and be forgotten. For what is it to thee, that shalt be as a blown-out flame? and all things in earth and heaven, and things past and things for to come, and life and death, and the mere elements of space and time, of being and not being, all shall be nothing unto thee; because thou shalt be nothing, for ever.

The Arrow of Gold http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/argld10h.htm (1919), Author's note,

5th Public Discussion, Saanen, Switzerland (8 August 1971)
1970s

Source: Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

Introduction
L'eau et les rêves (Water and Dreams) 1942

Source: A Woman of No Importance