The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.