Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering.

I am on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner.

Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.