Since I met you, I’ve felt abandoned without your nearness; your nearness is all I ever dream of, the only thing.
Let the future sleep for now, as it deserves. If you wake it too early, you get a groggy present.
No, I didn’t imagine my being alone with you the way you do. If I want the impossible, I want it in its entirety. Entirely alone, dearest, I wanted us to be entirely alone on this earth, entirely alone under the sky, and to lead my life, my life that is yours, without distraction and with complete concentration, in you.
Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don’t complain about it downstairs, we’re shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally.
The fact that no one knows where I am is my only happiness. If only I could prolong this forever! It would be far more just than death. I am empty and futile in every corner of my being, even in my unhappiness.
Lost among these entirely strange people.
One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.
By your side I’m most quiet and most unquiet, most inhibited and most free.
But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.
I have no literary interests; I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.
4 December. To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.
I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.
Judgement does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgement.
They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other – since there are no kings – messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.
Since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed to be provided at every instant with a new confirmation of my existence, since nothing was in my very own, undoubted, sole possession, determined unequivocally only by me – in sober truth a disinherited son – naturally I became unsure even of the thing nearest to me, my own body.
What do I have in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself, and really ought to go stand myself perfectly still in a corner, grateful to be able to breathe.
In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.
Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for.
I mustn’t look at you too much, or I won’t be able to take my eyes off you at all.
The moonlight lay everywhere with the natural peace that is granted to no other light.