Since they taught us a lesson in living, the Chinese, long before us, since the beginning of time, it is all the more painful to watch them now emulating us. When they have finally caught up with us, they will have lost all the lead they had over us. p148
The peoples he read about when he was young have died out in the meantime. p147
He put off his last fear and died. p147
Dickens is one of the disorderly writers; it seems that among the great ones there are the greatest. Order in the novel begins with Flaubert, there is nothing there that has not been sifted. Order attains perfection in Kafka. The effect he has on us is partly due to the fact that we have been subjected to many kinds of order that have drained life of its sap, we feel their power and dominance in everything we know of Kafka. But he still has breath, which he draws from Dostoevsky's confessional heat, and it is this breath that brings his ordered worlds to life. Only when these systems crumble will Kafka be dead. p147
One should tell oneself how fruitful misunderstandings are. One shouldn't despise them.
One of the wisest people was a collector of misunderstandings. p146
When the parasite has sucked himself full of your blood, you let him go.
You wouldn't lay hands on your own blood! p145
Since he has gone into hiding, he has a better opinion of himself. p145
One would like to end one's life in a meditation on words and thereby prolong it. p145
He hid and hid until he was finally forgotten. p144
If the poets don't support one another—what will be left of them? p144
Days when hope lingers before it dries up, happy days. p143
He makes no final dispositions. He won't grant death the honor. p143
Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don't be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper. p143
But I curse death. I can't help it. And if I should go blind in the process, I can't help it, I repulse death with all my strength. If I accept it, I would be a murderer. p142
Every person, especially every new person, animates you in an unpredictable, uncanny way. p141
Stendhal is to be envied for many things. Most of all for his complete exposure after his death. p141
What is attractive in Schopenhauer is his turning away from God, decisively and irrevocably.
A philosophy that is free of power, yet presumes the existence if God, is impossible. p140
It was said of her that she lived sixty years by the edge of the river but never bent down to look at it. p140
At the poles of eternity. When did it begin? When does it end? p140
The sum of a life, less than its parts. p138
Very few ideas in a lifetime, their constant return, as if they were new and yet familiar, wrapped in time as in leaves. p137
A supply of dead ones, for repenting. p135
He only says no for the sake of practice. p134
To die of the self-satisfaction of places. p134
To read until one no longer understands a single sentence, that alone is reading. p134
Whom does he still find tolerable, other than himself? And when he finally gets to the point where he can no longer tolerate himself, how will he manage to separate from himself? p134
Intolerable, a life one knows too much about. p133
Not to slow down before death: faster, faster. p133
"I am dying of thirst, let me drink of the waters of memory." —Orphic p133
There is nothing I could detach. There is always a human being connected to it. p133
You mourn for them, the dying languages, the dying animals, the dying earth. p130
What remains is not for you to decide. Don't try to decide it. p129
A country where anyone who says "I" is immediately swallowed up by the earth. p129
How much one loves, and how much one loves in vain, that is the essential thing. p129
Who dared to tear the animal mask from the gods of the Egyptians? p128
It is the sublime miracle of the human mind: memory, and this word for it moves me as though it were an ancient thing itself, forgotten and then retrieved. p127
"One might say that he who is not able to empathize with the joys and pains of all living creatures is not a human being." — Tsurezuregusa p127
The best thing about the oldest people would be that they want to bring back so many whom they have lost. Their respect for the people they have survived would have to be as great as their own sense of loss, and if it were possible to bring one of them back, they should bid him welcome with an offering of some of their own years. p126
The paranoid is on his way to nowhere. Everything external becomes a part of his inner labyrinth. He cannot escape himself. He loses himself without forgetting himself. p126
He fears the repercussions he causes in himself when he speaks to others. The echo of his words. p125
Too much past, suffocating.
But how marvelous the past was when it began. p125
Would Lichtenberg's notebooks have become boring if he had lived to the age of two hundred? p125
You know nothing, nothing, nothing. But does that make you a nihilist? p124
A blind Bible. p123
All the mass murders: early omens.
You knew it. You didn't say it.
Was that your hope? p123
It is so cold there that the names freeze. p122
Every place that allows for sentences is whole. Broken places stammer. p122
How can I be bored as long as I know words? p122
As soon as reincarnation is connected with karma, it becomes a predetermined order, none of the transformations still lying ahead is free, it is a compulsion of ceaseless dismemberment forever. But what makes true transformation wonderful and invaluable for human being is its freedom. Since it is possible to be transformed into anything, i.e., in all directions, it is impossible to predict where one will go. You stand at a crossroad that opens out in a hundred directions and — this is the most important thing — you have no idea which one you will choose.
The planning nature of man is a very late addition that violates his essential, his transforming nature. p119
It is difficult to write about a life and refuse to acknowledge the transience of anything... p121
If he knew who will be the last
person he sees, his life would proceed differently. p121
How long could you live without
admiration? Another reason for the creation of gods. p120
Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true. p120
Unknown to all, the secret heart of the clock. p120
So many people whom you couldn't take seriously wished you well, and how many whom you did take seriously didn't want anything to do with you! p118
It would be beautiful to disappear. Nowhere to be found. It would be beautiful to be the only one to know that you have disappeared. p117
A teaching can be so true that one discards it for that reason. p117
There the people are most alive while dying. p116
The words of praise that besmirch the purest things. p115
He imagines how old he would be if no one close to him had died. p112
The most difficult thing for one who does not believe in God: that he has no one to give thanks to. p111
When a grape sees another grape, it ripens. – Byzantine saying p111
You will not escape any signification. You will be distorted in every possible way. Maybe you only existed in order to be distorted. p110
What do you feel like when you close up the wall between you and the future? p109
To write in daggers or breaths? p107
To disappear, but not completely, so that you can know it. p106
Before it turns into decay, death is confrontation. Courage to face it, in defiance of all futility. Courage to spit death in the face. p106
He is more attached to failures than to successes. p106
Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous. p103
He thanks all who have released him from their hearts.
He wants to be alone in the end. p103
An evening of sorrow and herbs; in front of the window an egret. p103
In the end he received everything in his own lifetime and was forgotten. p102
Try not to judge. Describe. There is nothing more disgusting than condemnation. It's always this way or that and it's always wrong. Who knows enough to judge another? Who is selfless enough? p102
What is the use of remembering? Love now! Live now! Buy my only reason for remembering is to live now. p102
Even feigned modesty is good for something: it helps others build their own self-assurance. p100
How easy it is to reduce oneself in the eyes of others! One only has to invent some belittling things about oneself; no matter how improbable they may be, they will immediately be accepted and believed. p99
By watching others receiving honors, one experiences the ludicrousness of one's own. p98
Even the essential, the truly great things must make an effort to last. Everything has a fatal tendency to kick the dust from its heels. p98
It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes. p95
There is no forest left for the hermits, and the rice in the begging bowl is poisoned. p94
Pains, too, can be mistaken. p93
A newspaper pill: you swallow it and it sprouts inside you with all the news. p93
One must live as though humanity would continue to exist, and if one cannot contribute anything to its survival, one must at least not allow oneself to be intimidated. p91
Senility as salvation from fear. p91
The only salvation: the life of another. p91
To live as if no one knows you, except for those nearest to you. That would be the perfection of old age. p91
Praise destroys the regularity of breathing. p89
Alternately, a week in complete solitude and a week spent completely among people. Thus he learned to hate both: people and himself. p89
A life only at night: what replaces morning? p89
One star among billions, and yet one takes note of it? p89
He dug his teeth into his teacher's fame. His mouth become bitter from it. p89
Very different sorts of eternal students: those who always have their nose in a dictionary, and those who keep searching the books of wisdom. But there are also some who prefer to dissolve wisdom with the help of a dictionary. p88
I have no one to whom I could say: Release me. p88
To undo a name. p88
He (Chuang-Tzu) knows something about space, and he related the outer vastness of space to the inner. One could speak of him as the man who was filled with space. Filled, he remains as light as he would be empty if he ever could be empty. p88
The Heaven of the Chinese, lofty age of the human spirit, when it still wanted to preserve us. p87
Poets, looking like seagulls in flight, and, like seagulls, vicious with each other. p86
The beauty of the forgotten, before it reveals itself. p84
Oh, to be a book, a book that is read with such passion! p84
I am no longer irritated by the fairy tale's happy end: I need it. p83
The modest task of the poet may in the end be the most important one: to transmit what he has read. p83
No poet comes into being without the disorder of reading. p83
A better way of listening: listen to the unexpected, no longer knowing what one is listening to. p82
His disgust at success is so great that he is unfair even to those who deserve it. p82
Very beautiful is the feeling at an advanced age that one isn't anything yet. p81
As long as I have not clearly and unreservedly taken hold of death and its meaning, I have not lived. p80
Does one need God in order not to become all too important oneself? p80
Where are you, friend to whom I could tell the truth without plunging you into despair? p79
Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune? p78
Fame is added to fame, but the poor remain poor. p75
He is chockful of knowledge. He knows nothing. And still he wants to know. p74
Everything unfinished was better. It kept you suspended and dissatisfied. p74
One wishes to be praised, but what one craves is enmity. p71
Morality is narrow if one knocks against it. The real morality has become one's skeletal structure. p67
Wilted or frozen thoughts. p67
A day that remains entangled in its first hour. It never ends. p65
Dead, one is not even alone any longer. p64
Think a lot. Read a lot. Write a lot. Speak your mind about everything, but silently. p61
To extend your thinking from a thousand points, not just one. p61
Most terrible of all fates: to become fashionable before your death. p59
To write without a compass? I always have the needle in me, it always points to its magnetic north, the end. p59
"One moment in this world is more precious than a thousand years in the next." — Nuri, cited by Farid Al Din Attar p55
Seek as long as there still is something in you; remember, give yourself willingly to remembrance, do not scorn it, it is the best and most truthful thing you have, and everything you neglect in memory is lost and gone forever. p54
Turning fear into a hope. The poet's deception or achievement. p54
No massacre protects against the next one. p53
He no longer wants thoughts that bite. He wants thoughts that make it easier to breathe. p51
A person who cannot give up a room in which he has lived — how could he give up a human being? p50
Danger of a long life: forgetting what one has lived for. p49
A mind, learn in its own language. In others, it gets fat. p48
Contempt of God for his failed creation. A creation based on eating—how could it succeed? p46
The auctioned day. p46
I can't think of a more painful sight than a man fallen silent in his late years who once knew how to say many things. I do not mean the silence of wisdom, which keeps its peace out of a sense of responsibility. I mean the silence of disappointment that considers one's own life and the entire past to have been in vain. I mean the old age that has not become more than all that was before, the old age that would rather not have lived, because it feels reduced, not expanded. p41-42
It is important in literature that many things remain unsaid. One must be able to sense how much more the writer knows than he says, and that his silence is not a sign of dullness but of wisdom. p41
"The philosopher finds more grass in the valleys of stupidity than on the barren heights of cleverness." p41
"Ambition is the death of thought." p41
Have I thought enough about survival? Have I focused too narrowly on that aspect that belongs to the nature of power, and, because of that obsession, disregarded other, perhaps no less important aspects? p40
The new lust: rejecting all publicity. p40
Woe to the man whose name is greater than his work. —Wisdom of the Fathers p40
A person who opened himself too early to the experience of death can never turn away from it again; a wound that becomes like a lung through which one breathes. p40
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him? p35
There is so little left of Heraclitus that he is always new. p34
God has been interrupted by man. p33
There is no such thing as an ugly language. p32
The last human being, upon whom all the gods have set their hopes.
What will become of them after they have lost him? p29
More and more often he catches himself thinking that there is no way to save humanity. Is that an attempt to rid himself of responsibility? p25
A genuine praiser becomes isolated, otherwise his praise isn't worth anything. p25
Lapses of memory. Yet everything is there. Even what is most forgotten comes back, but in its own time. p24
The mistrust of anything thought-conceived, merely because it concludes and explains itself! p23
One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others... Sometimes, under special circumstances, it is right to suffocate. p20
One is free only if one wants nothing. What does one want to be free for? p16
Success is one day's insolence. p15
The semicolon's dream. p13
In order to become more proud, he lets himself be insulted again and again. p13
He who has too many words can only be alone. p8
Living dangerously? What life could be more dangerous than the life of separations? p6
I was never drawn to experiment with language; I take note of such experiments, but avoid them in my own writing.
The reason is that the substance of life claims me completely. To indulge in linguistic experiments is to ignore the greater part of this substance, leaving all but a tiny portion untouched and unused, as if a musician were to ceaselessly play an instrument with his little finger only. p3
