My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.

You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.

A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.

Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.