“A tedium that includes the expectation of nothing but more tedium; a regret, right now, for the regret I’ll havetomorrow for having felt regret today – huge confusions with no point and no truth, huge confusions…”

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

“To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.”

“To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.”

“To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.”

“A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.”

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”