“The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.”

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.

But every single damn thing matters! Only we don’t realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don’t realize that’s a lie.

The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter.

If life is misery, why do we endure it?

Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game.

Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.

Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.

I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don’t have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.

Fortunately, the courts discharged me every time after they understood what I had done.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

The Islamic ethic is that if God has given you the capacity or good fortune to be a privileged individual in society, you have a moral responsibility to society.

The man who is in the highest state of prosperity, and who thinks his fortune is most secure, knows not if it will remain unchanged till the evening.

I had much rather be adorned by beauty of character than by jewels. Jewels are the gift of fortune, character comes from within.

Wrapt up in error is the human mind, And human bliss is ever insecure; Know we what fortune yet remains behind? Know we how long the present shall endure?