Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

...the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of a person we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation--a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

A man endures misfortune without complaint.

They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.