To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.

That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?

[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity.

There were people who read and there were the others. Whether you were the a reader or a non-reader was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people.

Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?

In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.

Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!