The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.

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.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

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

One day you're cut off, at the very start you're cut off and can't go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again.

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

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.