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

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.

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.

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

If life is misery, why do we endure it?