Love is like death. It is fulfillment and an evening after which nothing more may follow. - Hermann Hesse

For the first time I understood Goethe’s laughter, the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an object. It was simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices, mistakes, passions, and misunderstandings of men and got through to eternity and the world of space. And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to speak, and its transformation again to space.

Now true humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.

In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other.