“Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

“This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.”

“Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.”

“For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”