Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.
That’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.
All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.
The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.
To what will love not stoop!
I had little talent for happiness.
If I were dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.
That’s what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.
The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.
Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.
Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.
I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of – how shall I say, I don’t know.
We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.
What do we do now, now that we are happy?
To have been always what I am – and so changed from what I was.
What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?
Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.
What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.