Thomas Bernhard

Everybody's poised above the abyss: but some people are always managing to shove the others over the edge: you can't postpone your being shoved over until you've finished living, that isn't permitted, that would be a lie, that would be impertinent, that would be idiotic, it's always the abyss that keeps us all alive, only the abyss...

We ask, but we receive no answer. We keep asking. Life in its entirety consists of nothing but questions, because we only ever exist where we keep asking questions but keep receiving no answers.

'The distances between human beings are increasing as the isolation of the individual is increasing . . . human beings,' said Moro, 'aim at entertainment and are consequently ancient history, in the baser strata of life as well as in the higher strata thereof; anyone who comprehends this is quite simply nauseated by it, and there is nothing truer than when somebody says that he is feeling nauseated.'

In the majority of faces there is nothing but stupidity, and it is stupidity to surmise that there is anything other than stupidity in all these faces or to look for anything other than stupidity in them or to wish to fathom anything other than stupidity in them . . .

We dread visitors, indeed we loathe them, and at the same time we cling to the outside world with all the despair of those who are cut off from it.

Parents. Childhood and everything after it. The process of isolation. Fragments of despair.

When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in, in every state that we imagine ourselves in.

Human beings are probably constructed for a world quite different from their own.

Suddenly, all of Germany believed it could turn to Goethe by letter, without exception. Every day Eckermann carried bushel baskets of letters to the various stoves. In this way, Goethe was kept warm most of the time with the mail he received in his last year.

I am a story destroyer, I am the typical story destroyer. In my work, at the very first sign of a story taking form, or if I catch sight of even a trace of a story, rising somewhere in the distance behind a mound of prose, I shoot it down. The same is true of sentences - I almost want to annihilate on advance whole sentences that even possibly could develop. 

Well, I am considered a so-called serious writer, the way Béla Bartók is a serious composer, and this reputation spreads . . . This is essentially a very bad reputation . . . I am absolutely discomforted by it. Then again, of course I am hardly a cheery author, no storyteller; I basically detest stories. 

One describes best what one hates, I thought.

As far as Georg and I are concerned, we never revealed our suicide perspectives to each other, we only knew of each other that we were at home in them. We were enclosed in our thoughts of suicide as in our room and in our conduit system, as in a complicated game, comparable to advanced mathematics. In this advanced suicide game we often left each other completely in peace for weeks. We studied and thought about suicide; we read and thought about suicide; we hid away and slept and dreamed and thought about suicide. We felt abandoned in our thoughts of suicide, undisturbed; no one bothered about us. We were at liberty to kill ourselves at any time, but we did not. As much as we had always been strangers to each other, there were never any of the many hundreds of thousands of odourless human secrets between us, only the secrets of nature as such, which we knew about. Days and nights were like verses of an infinitely harmonious dark song to us. 

So every day, when office hours are over, something intervenes, which stops me from despairing, although I should despair, although in truth I am in despair. And although I know that, because in fact I always have something after office hours which distracts me, not always something that pleases me, at least something that distracts me, I am, every time, afraid before office closing hours. Because one day, I think, it could be that I no longer have anything that gives me pleasure or even distracts me. There is simply no pleasure and no distraction any more⁠—it's a law of nature that for every person there is, one day, no pleasure nor any distraction any more, not the least pleasure, not the most insignificant distraction... 

We want to escape, to flee, but we can’t any more. They (and we ourselves) have bricked up all the exits to the open air. Suddenly, we see that they (like us) have walled us inside. Then we wait only for the moment when we choke to death. Then we often think whether it wouldn’t be better to be blind, perfectly deaf to our other crippling diseases, which we have to recognize as fatal because then we will see nothing more, hear nothing more, but at once that becomes self-deception too. We always wanted to be healed when no cure was expected because one was no longer possible. We always wanted to break out where there was no more breaking out.

And today it seems to me that we can count on the fingers of one hand all the people who have really meant anything to us in the course of our lives, and very often this one hand protests at our perversity in believing that we need a whole hand in order to count them, for to be honest we could probably make do without a single finger. There are times, however, when life is endurable, and at such times we occasionally manage to count three or four people to whom in the long run we owe something, and not just something but a great deal—people who have meant everything and been everything to us at certain critical moments or certain critical periods of our lives.