I asked: 'What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?' And I replied to quite another question: 'What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?' With the result that,...

Sacrificing earth to paradise is like leaving your fortune to a corpse. I'm not that stupid. Duped by the Infinite! I am nothing; I call myself Count Nothing, the senator. Did I exist before my birth?...

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer...

People are made to torment each other.

Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. "I am alone and they are everyone," I thought–and pondered.

I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me. And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me again - unless, indeed, this...

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-à-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well,...

What did it feel like to die? Was it a peaceful sleep? Some thought it was full of either trumpet-blowing angels or angry devils. Perhaps I was already dead.

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the...

What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake?

Possibility, infinity, beauty - - none of those words were right. {...} What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of...

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with...

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and...

That was with me for years - feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking...

afterlife, the space between earth and not - earth, world and not - world, highly polished floors and glass - roof cathedral echoes and the whole anonymous

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe? Life is...

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

Everything done, even the most innocent in appearance, is already guilty, already corrupted; it is thrown into the unclean flow of formation and can never swim back against the current again.

Death is neither there nor here, it rises on every path. It is in you and in me as soon as we betray life

What happens in me during rare moments of joy, which for me is pleasure, experience, ecstasy, and exaltation, the world perhaps only seeks in poetic works, and in life considers madness. And indeed,...

There was nothing to charm or tempt me. Everything was old, withered, grey, limp and spent, and stank of staleness and decay. Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and...

In fact, at times I preferred to live in the forbidden world, and frequently my return home to the bright realm, no matter how necessary and good that might be, was almost like a return to someplace...

He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.

And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught:...

Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was...

After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances. I may be an orange peel.