“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.

I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.

I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.

It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.

There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for us.

The limited circle is pure.

As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

I began to think that my time had come, as the saying is.

It is our part to seek, His to grant what we ask; ours to make a beginning, His to bring it to completion; ours to offer what we can, His to finish what we cannot.

The end of one story is the beginning of another.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.

Having a friend to listen to your problems and discuss them with you is the beginning of finding a solution.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.