I look a girl in the eye and it was a very long love story with thunder and kisses and lightning. I live fast.
You belong to me, even if I should never see you again.
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
I can never tear myself open wide enough to people to reveal everything and so frighten them away.
Don’t be too hasty, don’t take somebody else’s opinion without testing it.
I was wise, if you like, because I was prepared for death at any moment, but not because I had taken care of everything that was given to me to do, rather because I had done none of it and could not even hope ever to do any of it.
But what now if all the peace, the comfort, the contentment were to come to a horrible end?
I have discovered your great wound. You are dying from this flower blooming on your side.
I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason.
The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you,’ that is all that I have known, nothing more.
Everyone has his cross to bear.
I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but cannot stay up there for more than a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying.
What are our lungs supposed to do?” I shouted. Shouted: “If they breathe fast they suffocate themselves from inner poisons; if they breathe slowly they suffocate from unbreathable air, from outraged things. But if they try to search for their own rhythm they perish from the mere search.
Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves.
You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided.
Peaceful moon. I consist only of bones.
When one has lived for thirty years in this world and had to fight one’s way through it, as I have had to do, one becomes hardened to surprises and doesn’t take them too seriously.
Accept your symptoms, don’t complain of them; immerse yourself in your suffering.
I am never serious, and therefore I have to make jokes do duty both for jest and earnest.
But you get used to the air alright in the end. When you’re here for the second or third time you’ll hardly notice how oppressive the air is.