“Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”

“No one reads to know, but to forget”

“The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.”

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”

“Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.”

“If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumours of time.Man secretes disaster.The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.”

“I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.”