'If I write better German than most writers of my generation, it is thanks largely to twenty years' observance of one little rule: never use the word "I" except in letters.'

'Did someone tell you that?'

'How could someone tell you that?'

'Es ist möglich, daß in mir viele Blumen getötet wurden, es ist aber auch möglich, daß sie vielleicht gar nie da waren.'

'Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily passing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the real of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.'

'to one who is painfully precise' - a dedication that might as well have come from one of my daydreams.

Leibnizian phrases: 'very true', 'extremely reasonable'.

'It is always bad for a teacher when the children suddenly know something which he has not told them. The teacher should, so to speak, be the only hole in the fence through which one can see into the orchard; if there are other holes too, the children will press around a different one every day and will soon tire of the view anyhow.'

'Ich jause im Grünen.'

'The phenomenon of prior engagement: a loved person refuses herself to us not through inner antagonisms and inhibitions, too much coldness or repressed warmth, but because a relationship already exists that excludes another. Abstract temporal sequence plays in reality the part one would like to ascribe to the hierarchy of feelings. In being previously engaged there is, apart from the freedom of choice and decision, also an accidental element that seems in flat contradiction to the claims of freedom. Even, and precisely, in a society cured of the anarchy of commodity production, there could scarcely be rules governing the order in which one met people. Such an arrangement would amount to the most intolerable interference with freedom. Thus the priority of the fortuitous has powerful arguments on its side: someone ousted by a newcomer is always misused, a shared past life annulled, experience itself deleted.'