Quotes from a Berlin notebook Jan. 1980

'I haven't been everywhere, but its on my list.'

'I don't want to flatter my intelligence with evidence.'

'It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices.'

'Although none of the rules for becoming more alive are valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.'

'To find in myself the desire to stop listening to other peoples' distress.'

'Sometimes it helps to be paranoid. Conspiracies have the merit of making sense. It's a relief to discover your enemies, even if first you have to invent them.'

'It helps to feel guiltless about your sexual options.'

' Everyone is in some kind of moral drag.'

'One thickness of pain at a time.'

'The impatience of knowing.'

'The risk of accumulating too many truths.'

'How many trips we have to undertake so as not to be empty and invisible.'

'No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don't appear at all; they are invisible.' Sonntag

Back to title page