“What could be worse than another person's happiness? Not that his unhappiness would make us happy, but we need it in order to bear our own.”

“There's a kind of knowledge that stows away in our subconscious. We don't notice it because it's practiced at staying concealed as it travels along with us. A knowledge that must stay hidden because it would destroy us.”

“His shadow stretched out across the asphalt, a man on his way to make good an old wrong, his shadow, the dark doppelganger with stilts for legs, sliced in two by the streetcar tracks.”

“Shriveled apple cores stood side by side on the window sill, a long row of them with their seed chambers bitten open and the pointed sees scattered on the floor. The brown, discolored remnants of their flesh bore the imprint of his grandfather's teeth. That was the image This was left with, the one that ever since was the first to recur when he thought of his dead grandfather: shriveled apple cores on the sill of a window that looked out onto an overgrown garden.”

“If our state were really happy, we should not need to take our minds off it in order to make ourselves happy.”

“Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy, must we also rob one another of the pleasures that any heart may permit itself now and then? And name me a person who in a bad mood will be decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him. Is it not rather an inner dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves that is always associated with envy aggravated by foolish conceit? We see people happy and not made happy by us, and that is unbearable.”

“All of us are in the manufacturing industry - manufacturing either our own happiness or unhappiness.”