Gargoyles

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

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.

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

You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.

...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.

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

What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous

The empty rooms always had a terribly depressing effect upon my father when he considered, he said, that the person who dwelt in them had to fill them solely with his own fantasies, with fantastic objects, in order not to go out of his mind.

The essential elements of a person come to light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of everything about him that was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes truly visible.

Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.

Children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness.

She had been busy until two o’clock in the morning, her husband said, serving miners who had already been drunk for several hours and had divided into two hostile groups.

People or rather each person by himself, can very well be viewed as a novel serialized in a daily newspaper which is printed by nature.

We live by the assumption that problems are insoluble at night, soluble by day. That makes philosophizing possible

It had always been impossible for me to write to him. Each time I would immediately become aware of the awkwardness of suddenly expressing in black and white things that for years had only been private thoughts, speculations. Then too I was checked by a reluctance to bring up possibly long-forgotten matters as essential evidence for my view of us. For I would have had to proceed with sincerity and therefore ruthlessness, and yet show consideration for all concerned. That, too, made such a letter impossible for such a long time.

Proprio questa è la più perfetta delle magie: trovarsi insieme in un momento in cui l'esistenza è sopportabile.