Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
The meaning of life is that it stops.
No one can crave what truly harms him.
The man in ecstasy and the man drowning – both throw up their arms. The first to signify harmony, the second to signify strife with the elements.
Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world...
One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark.
It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?
I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.
Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.
It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.
You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.
Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.
It’s sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it’s at all possible ever to have any success in one’s work here.
I carry the bars within me.
We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?
You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.
Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.