"For the sadness in legitimate humour consists..." - Quote by Soren Kierkegaard

“If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.”

“And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.”

“When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?”

“You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father s. He's more particular. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.”

“Have you ever noticed that the lawyer always smiles more than the client?”

“I started out as Snow White, but then I drifted.”

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.”

“I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.”

“I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.”