"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

"I am a cage, in search of a bird."

"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."

"I am free and that is why I am lost."

"A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die."

"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

"All language is but a poor translation."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity." [Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."

"Books are a narcotic."

"Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life."

"Paths are made by walking"

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."

"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."

"Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself."

"Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more."

"There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us."

"I am in chains. Don't touch my chains."

"It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves."

"Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself."

"Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have."

"I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness."

"They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong"

"I usually solve problems by letting them devour me."

"In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world."

"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart."

"This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me."

"Love is a drama of contradictions."

"Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached."

"First impressions are always unreliable."

"I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it."

"May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air."

"Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers."

"We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."

"I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly."

"You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid."

"Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm."

"Kill me, or you are a murderer."

"Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts."

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."

"What am I doing here in this endless winter?"

"You are free and that is why you are lost."

"God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them."

"All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else."