“I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.”

“I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, ”

“If you catch me talking in my sleep, your conversation bored me.”

“Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.”

“Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw that this was not so.”

“People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives. The things I was saying followed logically the things that I had said before, yet bore no relation to what I was thinking and feeling.”