Irony is the first indication that consciousness has become conscious.
Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.
My only real concern has been my inner life.
I enjoy words. Better yet, I enjoy making words work. Words to me are palpable bodies, visible sirens, embodied sensualities.
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what strings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. I only know myself as a symphony.
Without faith, we have no hope, and, without hope, we don’t have life.
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
I always live in the present. The future, I can’t know. The past, I no longer have. Some days are entire philosophies in themselves that suggest us new interpretations of life, marginal notes full of acute criticism in the book of our universal destiny.
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has told them to feel.
“My past is everything I failed to be.”
“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”
“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
“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.”
“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”
“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”
“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
“Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!”
“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”
“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”
“Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.”
“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”
“Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.”
“I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.”
“But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?”
“Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.”
“And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.”
“...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.”
“Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.”
“My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?”
“What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.”
“Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.”
“what has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.”
“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.”
“I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.”
“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes to where life is not painful; nor is there a port of call where it is possible to forget.”
“My boredom with everything has numbed me.”
“Could it think, the heart would stop beating.”
“And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.”
“My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.”
“It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.”