Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.

And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.

Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.