The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.