“One is always half mad when one is shy of people.”

“Instances of delightfulness are always intrinsically beautiful, so to speak, and yet under the right circumstances they may be swinish as well, for what is humanly beautiful might, as it were, be too beautiful for human beings, for which reason people are glad to place beauty in proximity to pigpens, as one is no doubt justified in saying.”

“The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.”

“This is freedom,’ said the instructress, ‘it’s something very wintry, and cannot be borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it. That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away. Now you can watch freedom dying, if you open your eyes…”

“Money rules the world, and doubtless also, here and there, the bit of love within it, and when love turns to hate, one remembers unpaid board.”

“I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.”

“I was, I remember, nineteen years old, wrote poems, still wore no proper collar, ran out in the rain and snow, always woke up early in the morning, read Lenau, considered an overcoat a superfluous item, received a monthly salary of one hundred twenty-five francs and didn't know what to do with all that money.”