I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.

Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.

Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

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

And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.

Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.