Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.