Although I have sworn never to sin against blessed concision, I am still in complicity with words, and if I am seduced by silence I dare not enter it, I merely prowl on its peripheries.
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The Trouble with Being Born | 
Although I have sworn never to sin against blessed concision, I am still in complicity with words, and if I am seduced by silence I dare not enter it, I merely prowl on its peripheries.
A writer has left his mark on us not because we have read him a great deal but because we have thought of him more than is warranted.
It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.
No one has been so convinced as I of the futility of everything; and no one has taken so tragically so many futile things.
Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don‘t see against whom, against what...
When sleep departs from us, the unheard-of becomes everyday, easy: we enter [Time] without preparations, inhabit it, wallow in it.
Think about those who haven‘t long to live, who know that everything is over and done with, except the time in which the thought of their end unrolls. Deal with that time. Write for gladiators...
There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.
We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk. Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?
X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain.
Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; my second one, flabby. What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse.
“My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what let‘s me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.”
The first in a stack of antinatalism books I‘ve put together. Sometimes one requires the comfort of knowing that the darkest commentary of their own mind can be put into words.
“It‘s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone
The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don‘t know where that elsewhere is.
