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.
Of course I’m ignorant, that remains true at all events and is extremely distressing for me, but it does have the advantage that the ignorant man dares more, so I shall gladly put up with ignorance and its undoubtedly dire consequences for a while, as long as my strength lasts.
Other opportunities arise from time to time that almost don’t accord with the overall situation, opportunities whereby a word, a glance, a sigh of trust may achieve more than a lifetime of exhausting endeavour.
I’m not in the right place – alas, I cannot rid myself of the feeling that I’m not in the right place.
You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all.
You spend too much time on ephemeras. The majority of modern books are merely wavering reflections of the present. They disappear very quickly. You should read more old books. The classics. Goethe. What is merely new is the most transitory of all things. It is beautiful today, and tomorrow merely ludicrous.