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

It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.

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

I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself.

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.

Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.

...He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.