I’m lost if I find myself; I doubt what I discover; I don’t have what I’ve obtained. I sleep as if I were taking a walk, but I’m awake. I wake up as if I’d been sleeping, and I don’t belong to me. Life, in its essence, is one big insomnia, and all that we think or do occurs in a lucid stupor.
Does the peace I feel when I see you belong to you or to me?
On the other side sit we – the errand boy from around the corner, the unruly playwright William Shakespeare, the barber who tells stories, the schoolmaster John Milton, the shop assistant, the vagabond Dante Alighieri, those whom death either forgets or consecrates and whom life forgot and never consecrated.
Between an American millionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin and the Socialist boss of a village there is no qualitative difference, only quantitative.
I sleep and unsleep.
I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I’m proud of myself for dissenting from life.
Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.
Whole months have passed during which I haven’t lived, but have merely endured, caught between the office and physiology, marooned in an inner stagnation of thinking and feeling. Alas, this is not a restful state to be in, for putrefaction inevitably involves fermentation.
Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom.
I have never been anything more than a mere vestige, a simulacrum of myself.
As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.
I acquired, with regard to action, a transcendental honesty which, ever since I became aware of it, has inhibited me from having any strong links with the tangible world.
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.
Literature simulates life. A novel is a history of what never was and a play is a novel without narrative. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, since no one speaks in verse.
Before my unfeeling eyes, the repressed bitterness of my whole life peels off the suit of natural joy it wears in the prolonged randomness of every day. I realize that I’m always sad, however happy or content I may often feel. And the part of me that realizes this stands a little behind me...
Money can’t buy everything, but the personal magnetism that enables a man to make lots of money can, indeed, obtain most things.
To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand.
It could have been any number of things: hardship, grief or simply the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having suffered too much.
His voice was dull and tremulous, the voice of one who hopes for nothing, because all hope is vain.
So great is my tedium, so overwhelming the horror of being alive, that I cannot imagine what could possibly serve as a palliative, an antidote, a balm, a source of oblivion.