I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for? A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Dissect your motives deeper! You will find that no one has ever done anything wholly for others. All actions are self-directed, all service is self-serving, all love self-loving.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Everyone saw in my face evil traits that I didn’t possess. But they assumed I did, and so they developed. I was modest, and was accused of being deceitful: I became secretive. I had a strong sense of good and evil; instead of kindness I received nothing but insults, so I grew resentful. I was gloomy, other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them, but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, so I learned to hate. My colorless youth was spent in a struggle with myself and with the world. Fearing mockery, I buried my best feelings at the bottom of my heart: there they died.

Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage to face what he already knows.

If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh interior noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world's last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that "he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now." The pessimist suffers an unfiltered derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of their being: always the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see them.

For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that "unless you love yourself, no one else will love you."...The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation

The human obsession with purpose is merely a distraction from the absurdity of existence.

Existential grenades

Desires are already memories.

The true self [is] an immaterial pinprick of intensified consciousness, a point not in space and existing apart, separated from both material things and "other minds." Hence, we are alone, and yet our isolation continually strives to reach the consciousness of the other. And so we discover, those of us who are sufficiently interested in searching into our own introspective states of consciousness, that we exist alone through time. We can never know another human being and seldom, if ever, even know ourselves. When we do grasp the self, it is through the agency of a rather momentary feeling, a memory of the past that suddenly swallows our present consciousness.

The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts. That is why it proves inaccessible to unmediated perception.

Everything we do is for our first loves
whom we have lost irrevocably
who have married insurance salesmen
and moved to Topeka
and never think of us at all.

We fly planes & design buildings
and write poems
that all say Sally I love you
I’ll never love anyone else
Why didn’t you know I was going to be a poet?

The walks to school, the kisses in the snow
gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age:
our legs are young again, our voices
strong and happy, we’re not afraid.
We don’t know enough to be afraid.

And now
we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope
that some day
she may fly in our plane
enter our building, read our poem

And that night, deep in her dream,
Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka,
with the salesman lying beside her,
will cry out
our unfamiliar name.

I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being...not seeming, but being. Conscious at every moment. Vigilant. At the same time, the chasm between what you are to others and to yourself. The feeling of vertigo and the constant desire to, at last, be exposed...to be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated. Every tone of voice is a lie, every gesture a falsehood, every smile a grimace. Commit suicide? No, that’s vulgar. You don’t do that. But you can be immobile. You can fall silent. Then, at least, you don’t lie. You can close yourself in, shut yourself off. Then you don’t have to play roles, show any faces, or make false gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is bloody-minded. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life seeps in everything. You’re forced to react. No one asks if it’s real or unreal, if you’re true or false. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand your keeping silent, your immobility. That you’ve placed this lack of will into a fantastic system. I understand. I admire you. You should go on with this until it’s played out, until it’s no longer interesting. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.

Eating and drinking don’t make friendships – such friendship even robbers and murderers have.

That faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.