“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.”

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.

Nothing unites two people so completely, especially if, like you and me, all they have is words.

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

Most men are not wicked, They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

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.

Divorce can be crazy. Man, if you’re happy… Love is a beast, man. Hold on. Be prepared for any way it may go, and be honest.

Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

It’s a burden trying to keep a secret. It’s hard. It probably takes more out of you trying to hold it and keep it than it does for you to really let it out.

I have held and hold souls to be immortal…. Speaking as a Catholic, they do not pass from body to body, but go to paradise, purgatory or hell.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

If I hold her hand she says, ‘Don’t touch!’ If I hold her foot she says ‘Don’t touch!’ But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.