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

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

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.

Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

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.

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.