Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the...

Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.

I often feel an aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over – at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I listen to myself...

A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and...

Warum bedauern wir Leute, die nicht reisen können? Weil sie sich, indem sie sich äußerlich nicht ausbreiten können, auch innerlich nicht auszudehnen vermögen, sie können sich nicht vervielfältigen, und so ist ihnen die Möglichkeit genommen,...

I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the...

…nicht nur in der Zeit sind wir ausgebreitet. Auch im Raum erstrecken wir uns weit über das hinaus, was sichtbar ist. Wir lassen etwas von uns zurück, wenn wir einen Ort verlassen, wir bleiben dort,...

How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be...

Why do we feel sorry for people who can’t travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can’t multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of...

There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a nonreader–it was quickly noted. There was no greater distinction between people.

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?

…the dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now… To...

Human beings can’t bear silence. It would mean that they would bear themselves.

It is not the pain and the wounds that are the worst. The worst is the humiliation.

Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.

You can never have for yourself someone who isn’t on good terms with himself.

Each of us is several, is man, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In...

To stand by yourself — that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation...

One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments, and seeking disappointing experiences must be like an addiction, the all-determining addiction of his life, for it...

Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or...

Because the one who wishes it – isn’t the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go...