"...I thought to myself, 'Where in this town or in the whole world is the man to whose death would be a loss to me? And where is the man to whom my death would meaning anything?'"

"I had no motives, no incentives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I felt that the long-standing disgust was coming to a crisis and that life pushed me out and cast me aside."

“And since it appeared that I could not bear my loneliness any longer either, since my own company had become so unspeakably hateful and nauseous, since I struggled for breath in a vacuum and suffocated in hell…”

“More and more plainly, with a wildly beating heart, I felt the dread of all dreads, the fear of death. Yes, I was horribly afraid of death. Although I saw no other way out, although nausea, agony and despair threatened to engulf me; although life had no allurement and nothing to give me either of joy or hope, I shuddered all the same with an unspeakable horror of a gaping wound in a condemned man's flesh.”

"No one ever became happy by falling in love."

“All of a sudden a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could live once more and once more be a human being.”

"’Animals are sad as a rule,’ she went on. ‘And when a man is sad--I don't mean because he has a toothache or has lost some money, but because he sees, for once in a way, how it all is with life and everything, and is sad in earnest-he always looks a little like an animal. He looks not only sad, but more right and more beautiful than usual.’”

“Why do you wound my heart and then refuse to make it heal? And since you took it from me, why do you leave it now, abandoning the thing you robbed?”

“A thousand deaths my agony waiting as my life goes by, dying because I do not die.”

“I live yet do not live in me, am waiting as my life goes by, and die because I do not die.”

“No man can feel the iron which enters another man’s soul.”

“My God—and over and above it all there was Adam and the apple, and the whole of original sin. All this, then, was to be paid for in endless purgatory. And only then could the question arise whether, be hind all that, there was anything personal, anything of my own, left over; or whether all that I had done and all its consequences were merely the empty foam of the sea and a meaningless ripple in the flow of what was over and done.”

“In the mood between joy and fear that fate and parting imposed on me just now, all the stations and shrines of meditation in my life's pilgrimage caught once more that gleam of pain and beauty that comes from things past…”

“And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to speak, and its transformation again into space.”

“Yet the child within me felt a tremendous urge to wrap my mother in my arms and absorb every ounce of her anguish.”

“Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its unappetizing tone-slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it.”

“Sickness was near. Already seized by dark, your blood pulsed darker; though suspicious, for a flash it burst in its last April spring.”