“It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.”

“I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than ...”

“Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.”

“They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.”

“When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.”

“So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.”

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”

“There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”

“Perhaps the one unanswerable question in life is why so many of us choose to live in a fantasy world of our own creation that offers us nothing but pain.”

“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

“All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois s...”

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”

“I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet ...”

“The relationship between truth and reason:"Truth cannot be reached by reason alone!”

“I writeNotFor the sake of gloryNot For the sake of fameNotFor the sake of successBut for the sake of my soul”