You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.
All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.
The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.
Nothing but disaster follows from applause.
One day you’re cut off, at the very start you’re cut off and can’t go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again.
A criminal is undoubtedly a poor soul, who is punished for his poverty.
We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.
I had to spend my entire childhood in the Altensam dungeon like an inmate doing time for no comprehensible reason, for a crime he can’t remember committing, a judicial error probably.
We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there’s no other motive except the even baser one of making money...
Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself...
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.
The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.
We Can Only Exist By Taking Our Minds Off The Fact That We Exist.
Toda idea, al fin y al cabo, es una idea demencial.
Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.