Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet

Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun.

Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.