Tyll

by Daniel Kehlmann

And all of us, looking up, suddenly understood what lightness was. We understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted, who believed in nothing and obeyed no one; we understood what it would be like to be such a person, and we understood that we would never be such people.

Is there really a baby inside her, kicking and thrashing around and listening to them? The thought disturbs him. When God wants to make a person, why does he do it in another person? There’s something ugly in the fact that all beings emerge in obscurity: maggots in dough, flies in excrement, worms in the brown earth.

But you must simply snatch knowledge wherever it can be found. People are not meant to languish in ignorance.