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““There are times when my longing for you overwhelms me, so often I can only think of you with teeth clenched.”

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I can only explain it to myself.”

“I am forever chained to myself; that’s what I am and that’s what I must live with.”

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”

“I have spent my entire life resisting the desire to end it.”

“Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: ‘Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.’ Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”

“I mustn’t look at you too much or I won’t be able to take my eyes off you at all.”

“So we’ve drifted apart entirely, Milena, and the only thing we seem to share is the intense wish that you were here, and your face as close to me as possible. And of course we also share this death wish—this wish to die ‘comfortably’ but in reality, that is wish small children have anyway, like myself, for instance, during arithmetic. I would see the teacher leafing through his notebook, probably looking for my name, and would compare my inconceivable lack of knowledge to this spectacle of power, terror, and reality. Half dreaming with fear, I wished I could rise like a ghost and run down the aisle between the desks, fly by my teacher as light as my knowledge of mathematics, somehow pass through the door, then, once outside, I would pull myself together and be free in the wonderful air which, in all the world know to me, did not contain any greater tensions than those found in that classroom. That would have been ‘comfortable’ indeed. But that’s not the way it happened.”

“I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my hand, and remain like that through eternity.” 

“I am dirty, Milena. Infinitely dirty. This is why I scream so much about purity. No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell—what we take to be the song of angels is their song.”

“Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.”

“It’s so wonderful to have received your letter, to have to answer it with my sleepless brain. I can’t think of anything to write. I’m just walking around here between the lines, underneath the light of your eyes, in the breath of your mouth like in some beautiful happy day which stays beautiful and happy even if my hed is sick, tired.”