Quotes from K?b? Abe

Loneliness - since I was trying to escape it - was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apprently happiness.

When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.

Life wouldn't be easier or not easier. Aren't both generalizations logically impossible? Since there's no correlation, there can be no comparison.

It would seem that man befouls his daily life with his own excretions far more than a dog does.

The act of writing is not simply replacing facts with arrangements of letters; it is a kind of venturesome trip. I am not like a postman on a preordained route. There is danger, and discover, and satisfaction.

I do not really understand. What was happening inside you? I did not have a clue.

The lecher in general is like an honest, hardworking investigator who, once aware of a mystery, will go to any length to solve it.

Although the mask had frantically tried to break down the barrier, you had slipped through it without touching. Like the wind … or a spirit. I do not understand you. Putting you to any further tests would be nothing more than my own destruction.

thanks to the mask, signs of fatigue or shame showed on my face no more than on yours.

The mask, that should be the victor, lay stupidly on the table, like an obscene picture that has drained all one's desire;

When man evolved from the monkey, he did not do so by his use of tools, as is usually claimed, but because he had come to distinguish himself from monkeys by his face.

Even though I might tear the mask off of your hypocrisy, you had a thousand layers of masks, and one after another a new one would appear; but my mask was only a single ply, and under that there remained not even a layer of ordinary face.

it would be well if I believed the child's eyes with complete confidence. Wouldn't anybody first have to return to this kind of intuition if he sincerely wanted to face others?

The mask was no longer a means by which to get you back, but only a hidden camera through which to watch your betrayal of me. I had made the mask for the purpose of recovering myself. But it had willfully escaped from me and, taking great pleasure in its evasion, had become defiant;

what cheered me most was to watch the girl quietly playing with her yoyo in the shadow of the emergency stairs, unseen by anyone but me. She was burdened with a great misfortune that she could not perceive as misfortune. She did not know how much luckier she was than the rest of mankind aware of unhappiness.

To the left of the rubber boots in the front lie the corpse of the mask and the button. I leave it all up to you. I shall have returned home a step ahead of you. I pray with all my heart that you will come back with your usual expression, as if nothing has happened.…

Whatever the result, it would surely be much better than this extraordinary three-sided relationship—this self-intoxication with jealousy that continued to grow like a cancer.

I had better think things through carefully again after I have returned with your surrender in hand.

my real face, which was merely an incomplete copy of the mask...

my premonitions, darker than the inside of a monster's throat, spewed out ominous vapor.

She seemed to be wearing frozen fish bladders for shoes. But

I fixed my eyes in the vicinity of the yellowish-brown darned spot around the little green button at your breast.

If we had been far apart even before the accident, what was I trying to recapture at this late date with all the fuss about the mask? Nothing was worth the trouble of getting back. There wasn't a single thing to hide from the eight uneventful years we had spent together; since I was enclosed by a wall of nonexpression thicker than my bandages, I had lost all right to complain.

I couldn't see you, no matter how I tried, if you moved around like a jellyfish.