From "Extinction" by Thomas Bernhard

"We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only a gaping void. We go into a house where as children we spent such happy hours, such happy days, and we believe we're revisiting our childhood, but all we find is a gaping void." p. 301

"However lovable a person is, we only have to consider him for a time--if only in our mind, in which case he can be as far away as we like--and little by little he is transformed from a good person into a bad person." p. 300

We spend a lifetime trying to understand ourselves and don't succeed, so how can we pretend to understand something that isn't ourselves?" p. 81

"However intense my reflections, I won't be able to shorten the night." p. 296

"The tragedy of the would-be writer is that he resorts to anything that keeps him from writing." p. 100