Sabeth listened when I told her about my experiences, but as one listens to an old man; without interrupting, politely, without believing, without getting excited.
Come,” she said. “We’re married, Walter, married. Don’t touch me.
Do you know,” she said, “that was the Ludovisi Altar we liked so much this morning. It’s madly famous!” I let her give me a lecture.
Everything happened exactly as I had intended it shouldn’t.
It is remarkable that the persons we love most are those we can least describe.
A person who does not concern himself with politics has already made the political choice he was so anxious to spare himself: he is serving the ruling party.
The ants Geiser recently observed under a dripping fir tree are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory.
To write is to read one’s own self.
People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?
To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us.
Hanna had Communist leanings, which I couldn’t bear, and on the other a tendency to mysticism, or to put it less kindly, hysteria.
How many of the people I meet are interested in whether I’m enjoying myself, in my feelings at all?
I can’t bear being told what I ought to feel; although I can see the subject under discussion, I feel like a blind man.
Her supposition that I was melancholy because I was alone put me out of humour. I’m used to travelling alone. I live, like every real man, in my work. On the contrary, that’s the way I like it and I think myself lucky to live alone, in my view this is the only possible condition for men, I enjoy waking up and not having to say a word. Where is the woman who can understand that?
When I woke Herbert, he sprang to his feet. What was the matter? When he saw that nothing was the matter, he started snoring again – to avoid being bored.
I had said what I never meant to say, but what has been said cannot be unsaid, I enjoyed our silence, I was completely sober again, but all the same I had no idea what I was thinking, probably nothing.
Conversation was hardly possible; I had forgotten that anyone could be so young.
In general, only the future counted for her, and to a slight extent the present; but she had no interest at all in past experiences, like all young people.
I can’t have feelings all the time. Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don’t want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn’t always fun, you can’t always be in form.
The wish to walk on earth – there beneath the last firs standing in the sunshine, to smell their resin and listen to the water, which is probably roaring, to drink water.