"People talk about the happy life, but that's the happy life when you don't care any longer if you live or die. You only get there after a long time and many misfortunes. And do you think you are left there? Never.
"As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you."
---
"Three hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a half trying to make myself look like everyone else. Every worde I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And, mind you, I know that will all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. . . . But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think --- and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt."
---
"This damned room -- it's saturated with the past. . . . It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . ."
---
"I can see myself in the mirror. I look thin -- too thin -- and dirty and haggard, with that expression that you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are."
---
"When she looks at herself in the glass, naked, she's as proud as Lucifer."
---
"'God is cruel,' I said, 'very cruel. A devil, of course. That accounts for everything -- the only possible explanation.'"
"'I'm going out,' Enno said. 'I can't stay in here. I must go out.'"
"I stayed there, looking down at the dark red, dirty carpet and seeing a dark wall in the hot sun -- the wall so hot it burned your hand when you touched it -- and the red and yellow flowers and the time of the day when everything stands still."
---
"But, after all, those were still the days when I went into a cafe to drink coffee, when I feel gay on half a botle of wine, when this happened and that happened.
"But they never last, the golden days. And it can be sad, the sun in the afternoon, can't it? Yes, it can be sad, the afternoon sun, sad and frightening."
---
"And when I have a couple drinks I shan't know whether it's yesterday, today or tomorrow."
---
"'Is it true that Englishmen make love with all their clothes on, because they think it's more respectable that way?'
"'Yes, certainly. Fully dressed. They add, of course, a macintosh.'"
---
"How on earth can you say why you love people? You might as well say you know where the lightning is going to strike."
---
"'Well, well,' it says, 'last time you looked in here you were a bit different, weren't you? Would you believe me that , of all faces I see, I remember each one, that I keep a ghost to throw back each one -- lightly, like an echo -- when it looks into me again?' All glasses in all lavabos do this."
---
"No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarass us. . . ."
---
"I feel his hard knee between my knees. My mouth hurts, my breasts hurt, because it hurts, when you have been dead, to come alive. . . ."
---
"Then I put my arms round him and pull him down on to the bed, saying: 'Yes - yes - yes. . . .'"
