Officials are highly educated but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him ... he won't understand a word of it.

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world.

There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.