Quote collection
317 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars."
"In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream."
"We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses."
"I don't believe in the landscape."
"I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by."
"I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life."
"I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat."
"I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything."
"...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad."
"Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!"
"But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be."
"Literature exists because the world isn't enough."
"Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it."
"The human soul is an abyss"
"And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living."
"Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness."
"It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything."
"Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built."
"To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life."
"I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad."