Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.

The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty, but record the worst of human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That's work enough for a lifetime.

The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.

The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.

Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.