Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.
You can only do what you can no matter how you try.
Clinging to one’s outward appearance interferes with living.
These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalmentism.
I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world.
One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.
The future is forever a projection of the present.
Loneliness—since I was trying to escape it—was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.
The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.
Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.
It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.
If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.
When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?
When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.
There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.
They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.