Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.

Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.

What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous

You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.