Our knowledge of life is limited to death

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting

Little by little things began to assume a new aspect. The sense of insecurity vanished, words came of themselves, I was no longer so painfully conscious of everything I said. I drank on and felt the great soft wave approach and embrace me; the dark hour began to fill with pictures and stealthily the noiseless procession of dreams appeared again superimposed on the dreary, grey landscape of existence.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.