We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake.

— Thomas Bernhard

We have relinquished and abandoned and left behind and forgotten what we believed we had to relinquish, abandon and leave behind and ultimately forget; we have let ourselves go, and we have gone away, and we have gone under, but we have relinquished nothing and abandoned nothing and left behind nothing and forgotten nothing; we have in reality extinguished nothing whatsoever, because our parents did not inform us of or enlighten us about the fact that our life-process is in reality nothing but a process of illness. We were up above, in the company of our parents, locked up in our walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us was nothing but lethal, and we are down below, without our parents, again locked up in these walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us is nothing but lethal.

— Thomas Bernhard

We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.

— Thomas Bernhard

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed, and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.

— Thomas Bernhard

We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.

— Thomas Bernhard

Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're being longing for than to be stifled by our longing.

— Thomas Bernhard

When we do something, we may not think about why we are doing what we are doing, says Other, for then it would suddenly be totally impossible for us to do anything.

— Thomas Bernhard

When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in, in every state that we imagine ourselves in.

— Thomas Bernhard

Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.

— Thomas Bernhard

You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

— Thomas Bernhard