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

We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.

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

All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.

Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others.

All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.