“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me want to dream.”

“I confess I do not know why, but looking at the stars always makes me dream.”

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”

“Mondrian... The constructivists?... They had certainties. They wanted a stable basis to work on, but I’m afraid that that was enormous arrogance on their part. Nothing is stable and no certainties are possible.”

“What makes you so certain?"
"But I am not certain," I told him. "Nothing is certain. You want certainty?"
"Yes!"
"Then you want death.”

“There is nothing enduring, permanent, either in me or out of me, nothing but everlasting change. I know of no existence, not even of my own. I know nothing and am nothing. Images — pictures — only are, pictures which wander by without anything existing past which they wander, without any corresponding reality which they might represent, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these images, or rather a confused image of these images. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a world of which the dream might be, or a mind that might dream it. Contemplation is a dream; thought, the source of all existence and of all that I fancied reality, of my own existence, my own capacities, is a dream of that dream.”

“I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”

“I know all about dreams that make you want to scream.”

“I wanted him to hold me, to take care of me. To make the pain dissolve away. I know that this was part of what had ruined everything but I wanted it once more anyway.”

“I tried to pass for nothing
But my dreams gave me away”