Quotes from K?b? Abe

Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?

One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.

You don't need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don't ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.

Being free always involves being lonely.

Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn't hold good for anybody else.

The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.

He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.

I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand.

What in heaven's name was the real essence of this beauty? Was it the precision of nature with its physical laws, or was it nature's mercilessness, ceaselessly resisting man's understanding?

Could having a face be such an important requirement? Was being seen the cost of the right to see?

If there were no risk of a punishment, a getaway would lose the pleasure.

So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.

I personally feel that a box, far from being a dead end, is an entrance to another world. I don't know to where, but an entrance to somewhere, some other world.

Nothing is so awkward as a demonstration of humanity by the enemy.

If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn't have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.

Without the threat of punishment, there is no joy in flight.

The suffering of being imprisoned rests in the fact that it is impossible, at any time, to escape from oneself.

No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.

Animal smell is beyond philosophy.

In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.