The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter.

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.

Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.