“All language is but a poor translation.”

Do you know, darling? When you became involved with others you quite possibly stepped down a level or two, but If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

Love is a drama of contradictions.

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.

You only need to change your direction, said the cat, and ate it up.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

It certainly was not my intention to make you suffer, yet I have done so; obviously it never will be my intention to make you suffer, yet I shall always do so.

I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.

Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.

For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.

Language forms a kind of wealth, which all can make use of at once without causing any diminution of the store, and which thus admits a complete community of enjoyment; for all, freely participating in the general treasure, unconsciously aid in its preservation.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

If a novel is written in a certain language with certain characters from a particular community and the story is very good or illuminating, then that work is translated into the language of another community.