Elias Canetti

Relearn astonishment.

All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.