Quotes from book

Three Comrades

“I've not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy.”

“For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.”

“It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.”

“Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”

“Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.”

“To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.”

“I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.”

“Keep things at arm's length… If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.”

“Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.”

“That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.”

“Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.”

“I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.”

“With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.”

“It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”