“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.”

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Please — consider me a dream.

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

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.

If you can’t sleep, count sheep. Don’t count endangered animals. You will run out.

My trust in you is broken and I am plunged into despair for the animals.

In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

The people turn in allegiance to Humanity, as surely as water flows downward or as a wild animal takes cover in the wilderness.

A fox is subtlety itself.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.

I think animal crackers make people think that all animals taste the same.