I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting; even so, when I then want to raise my eyes to your face, in the middle of the letter -fire breaks out and I see nothing but fire.
And when once in a while some leisurely passer-by stopped, made merry over the old figure on the board, and spoke of swindling, that was in its own way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.
This afternoon I couldn’t get out of bed, not because I was too tired but because I was too “heavy” – again and again that word, it’s the only one that fits me, do you understand this at all? It’s something like the “heaviness” of a ship which has lost its rudder and which says to the waves: “I’m too heavy for myself and for you too light”.
The way she sits on my lap as if it were her proper place!
Silent, not from embarrassment or any other reason, but simply silent.
I avoid people not in order to be able to live in peace, but in order to be able to die in peace.
Not every child has the endurance and fearlessness to go on searching until it comes to the kindliness that lies beneath the surface. You can only treat a child in the way you yourself are constituted.
It is a long dark road from there to where I have really come.
If you can laugh into the telephone, you must be a very accomplished telephonist. The very thought of the telephone makes me forget laughter.
Forgive me for not having answered you right off, but I still have not developed the technique for making good use of my few hours; midnight comes apace, as now.
I will cross hundreds of seas and oceans without sinking to reach you, see your eyes and sink completely into their depths.
Indubitable in me is the greed for books. Not so much to own or to read them as to see them, to convince myself in a bookseller’s display of their continued existence. When there are several copies of the same book somewhere every single one gives me pleasure. It’s as if this greed came from my stomach, as if it were a misdirected appetite. Books I own give me less pleasure, whereas my sisters’ books do give me pleasure. The longing to own them is incomparably smaller, it’s almost absent.
I only realize I am kneeling because I see your feet right before my eyes.
Yesterday I advised you not to write me every day, I still hold the same opinion today and it would be very good for both of us, and so I repeat my advice today even more emphatically – only please, Milena, don’t listen to me, and write me every day anyway.
When I say something it immediately and definitively loses its importance, when I write it down it always loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one.
There are possibilities for me, certainly, but under what stone do they lie?
To be sure, the deeper one digs one’s pit, the quieter it becomes; the less anxious one becomes, the quieter it becomes.
I sink into your eyes whenever I’m looking at you.
It was very learned, but it didn’t actually say anything.
In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today, when the possibility of surveying our condition at that time does make us wiser, but we therefore must recognize all the more the undauntedness of our striving at that time, which in sheer ignorance nonetheless sustained itself.