A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet.

Great and small suffer the same mishaps.

The incurable ills are the imaginary ills

Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?

Most of us aren't equipped to handle miracles, man. I'm not sure that I am, not without being seriously stoned.

The world is full of broken people who think they are surrounded by whole people.

We are merely ghost flowers under the shade of the moon...

Our life is a journey, through winter and night, We look for our way, in a sky without light.

Well, then, what's the plan now? You can't stay here forever.'My plan was indeed to stay there forever.

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

We're all suicides. The tragedy is every day that we don't die.

War doesn't have heroes, it only has the men who lost so many things in their life that they just keep going and do the most unthinkable things, just because they don't care anymore.

It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that...

But then again... perhaps the whole human race is cursed, and I'm simply in the lower echelon and therefore lose everything first.

Before this moment, I have never wished to be something other than what I am. Never felt so keenly the lack of hands with which to touch, the lack of arms with which to hold. Why did they give me this...

They did nothing to us, they merely plunged us into absolute nothingness, because it is known that nothing exerts as much pressure on the human soul as nothingness...

One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.

In the evening, after we dance, he rarely returns to the throne; he dances with others or he moves from place to place through the room. The court thinks he is trying to be gracious, sharing his...

Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither...

He could hope for many things, though he had stopped doing so long ago. If one didn't hope, then disappointment didn't visit. Hoping meant you had somehting to live for, and living for something or...

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you...

To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and awaits its fate, if only for a while.

There's been terrible things we've seen, haven't there? And more likely to come, more than likely. So I think I'd rather not know what's in the future. I'll stick to the present.

Bits of it floating in the air, he said. It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's there and it's all coming down, covering everything. You're breathing it in. You...

Do we miss not only the past but every future the lost past describes? Is that just the nature of missing? All the lost might - have - beens? The certainty that those uncertain futures are gone?

- The renegade robots are now long dead, the metal ones rusted, the human ones bled.

Despair is the price everyone pays for self-knowledge. If you look carefully at life, you will always find despair.

Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread - and in one moment the brain is stronger, the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all is!

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love,...

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up...