The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.

I had to spend my entire childhood in the Altensam dungeon like an inmate doing time for no comprehensible reason, for a crime he can't remember committing, a judicial error probably.

We Can Only Exist By Taking Our Minds Off The Fact That We Exist

What can you do. You get a name, you're called 'Thomas Bernhard', and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.

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

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.