Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work.

There are moments when we are incapable of exchanging a single word with anybody…it’s beyond us…

Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write down anything.

Sometimes words are not enough.

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

There are times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost. ... When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and examinations, one's brain becomes encumbered with a lot of bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use. At the present time my mind is so full of heterogeneous matter that I almost despair of ever being able to put it in order. Whenever I enter the region of my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in the china shop. A thousand odds and ends of knowledge come crashing about my head like hailstones, and when I try to escape them, theme goblins and college nixies of all sorts pursue me, until I wish – oh, may I be forgiven the wicked wish! – that I might smash the idols I came to worship.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.

There are times when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational working of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the actual leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.

There arises from a bad and inapt formation of words, a wonderful obstruction to the mind.

Think of it as "existential overwhelm": the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you'd ideally like to do and what you actually can do.