“That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.”

“What a glut of books! Who can read them?”

“[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.”

“As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working ...”

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, andin spite of True Romance magazineswe shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do no...”

“I never really understood the word loneliness. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.”

“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the pai...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”