“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”

“Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a bookkeeper forever, and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty. In the future I'll be living quietly in a little house somewhere, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will use different excuses to the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself.”

“I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.”

“When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.”

“I am nothing.I will never be anything.I cannot wish to be anything.Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.”

“I am nothing.I'll never be anything.I couldn't want to be something.Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”