“I don’t see why it’s impossible to express everything that’s on one’s mind.”

Most people can’t understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don’t notice whether it’s passing quickly or slowly.

What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.

Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.

Belonging to oneself–the whole essence of life lies in that.

No matter how often you knock at nature’s door, she won’t answer in words you can understand–for Nature is dumb. She’ll vibrate and moan like a violin, but you mustn’t expect a song.

Love isn’t actually a feeling at all–it’s an illness, a certain condition of body and soul…. Usually it takes possession of someone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will–just like cholera or a fever.

That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.

I’m incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn’t want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I’d never experienced it.

It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.

I was afraid of looking into my heart…afraid of thinking seriously about anything…I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to admit to myself that I was not loved.

Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.

Even nightingales can’t be fed on fairy tales.

Go and try to disprove death. Death will disprove you, and that’s all!

He was the soul of politeness to everyone — to some with a hint of aversion, to others with a hint of respect.

The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.

I think it’s important for people to be themselves and express themselves through their makeup or their hair or their perfume or whatever it may be.

Ghosting is an expression of extreme anxiety and fear of intimacy. As much as it hurts to be on the receiving end, please know it was never about you.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

I was always drawn to more the social-expression-of-culture types.

As many know, the Chinese expression for “crisis” consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for “danger,” the second the symbol for “opportunity.”