'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.'

'At this time such a profession, far from being regarded as disgraceful, was considered quite honourable. It is an attitude that can be illustrated even to-day by some of the inhabitants of the mainland among whom successful piracy is regarded as something to be proud of; and in the old poets, too, we find that the regular question always asked of those who arrive by sea is 'Are you pirates?' It is never assumed either that those who were so questioned would shrink from admitting the fact, or that those who were interested in finding out the fact would reproach them with it.'

A plan which comes to nothing may still be satisfying to complete.

Even when speechless, ever avoiding a quiet moment.

'stehn / sprachlos und kalt'