“The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.”

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.

But every single damn thing matters! Only we don’t realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don’t realize that’s a lie.

The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter.

If life is misery, why do we endure it?

Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game.

Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.

Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.

I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don’t have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.

As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.

We read on the foreheads of those who are surrounded by a foolish luxury, that fortune sells what she is thought to give.

A certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune.

Pantagruelism is a certain gaitey of the spirit consisting in a disdain for the hazards of fortune.

One should never pursue the hazards of fortune to their very ends andit behooves all adventurers to treat their good luck with reverence, neither bothering nor upsetting it.

That which we acquire with the most difficulty we retain the longest; as those who have earned a fortune are usually more careful of it than those who have inherited one.

Against fortune the carter cracks his whip in vain.

Fortune, like other females, prefers a lover to a master, and submits with impatience to control; but he that wooes her with opportunity and importunity will seldom court her in vain.

No matter how much money, fame, and fortune you have, it doesn’t mean sh** if it’s not connected with love.