Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself. It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes

Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.

Perception of a state is not the state.

Writings like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.