Whoever is devoid of the capacity of wonder, whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life.
deadquotes
It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.
I swayed between fear, defiance, and nausea, and was wholly the prey of my passion. I could not and did not want to listen to the depths. But on the seventh night, the spirit of the depths spoke to me: Look into your depths, pray to your depths, waken the dead.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don’t stop working — hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.
Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate…but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.
I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.
I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.
