When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day.
I am a memory come alive, hence my insomnia.
Sono stato due ore coricato sul divano e credo di non aver pensato ad altro che a te.
My powers of reasoning are incredibly limited; to sense the development in the results, that I can do, but to ascend from the development of the results or step by step to reconstruction it from the results, that is not given to me. It is though as I were falling down upon these things, and caught sight of them only in the confusion of my fall.
As happiness recedes into dreams, the passion ended where it began: in sleepness.
He is a land surveyor, well, perhaps that is something, he has trained at something, but if there’s nothing you can do with that training then it means nothing.
He watched as it slowly began to get light everywhere outside the window too. Then, without his willing it, his head sank down completely, and his last breath flowed weakly from his nostrils.
Hers was a nature made for intrigue, apparently working for no purpose, like the wind, according to strange and distant orders of which no one ever got a sight.
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.
He was always inclined to take life as lightly as he could, to cross bridges when he came to them, pay no heed for the future, even when everything seemed under threat. But here that did not seem the right thing to do.
The chains that cuff humanity are made of office paper.
Amalia smiled, and that smile, although a sad one, lit up her sombre face, made her silence eloquent and her strangeness familiar. It was like the telling of a secret, a hitherto closely guarded possession that could be taken back, but never taken back entirely.
Please, Father, let he future rest, as it deserves. If you wake it ahead of time, the only result is a sleepy-headed present. You shouldn’t need your son to remind you of that.
Alone – do you know what that means?
Ah, coherence, that old canard. All the books are full of it, in all the classrooms the teachers are chalking it up on the blackboard; the mother dreams of it while her baby is at her breast – and there you are, sitting here, asking me about coherence. You must have had an unusually misspent youth.
You belong to the people I have to combat, and you’re very comfortable among them, you’re even in love with the student, or if you don’t love him you do at least prefer him to your husband.
He certainly goes into the offices, but are the offices really the castle? And even if the castle does have offices, are they the offices which Barnabas is allowed to enter?
Language can be used only very obliquely of things outside the physical world, not even metaphorically, since all it knows to do – according to the nature of the physical world – is to treat of ownership and its relations.
As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.
How suicidal happiness can be!