If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?
Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.
I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.
I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that for all eternity.
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.
Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.
I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.
God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
We were expelled from Paradise, but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.
Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn’t make it true.