“All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

They say ignorance is bliss, they’re wrong

You can choose to be free , but it’s last decision you’ll ever make

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

I am free and that is why I am lost.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

No, said the priest, you don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary. Depressing view, said K. The lie made into the rule of the world.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

For myself I am too heavy, and for you too light.

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

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.