Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear.
I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
We spend our life, it’s ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.
The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.
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.