Tyll

by Daniel Kehlmann

You can find something better than death everywhere.”

the maelstrom in the heart of the world caught fire. And now the thing that is the world is spinning like a spindle and eternally giving birth to stars, for since time has no beginning it has no end either.

An infinite amount of time cannot be over. Therefore it simply must have begun.

Running away is a wonderful thing.

life simply leads you somewhere or other—if you weren’t here, you would be elsewhere, and everything would be just as strange.

whether a person will go to hell for stealing so many books.

you must simply snatch knowledge wherever it can be found. People are not meant to languish in ignorance. And when you have no one to talk to, it’s not easy. So much preoccupies you, but no one wants to hear it, your thoughts about what the sky is and how stones come into being, and flies, and the teeming life everywhere, and in what language the angels speak with each other, and how the Lord God created himself and still must create himself, day after day, for if he didn’t d...

He will have to practice a lot before he will be able to fill a whole book with spidery signs in ink. But it has to happen, for he cannot forever retain in his memory everything he has found out. Even now it’s too much, it’s painful to him, often he feels dizzy from all the knowledge in his head.

a gift is a promise, and a promise is binding before God. To invite someone on a journey is not yet a gift, but it is almost a promise.

Memory is a peculiar thing: it doesn’t simply come and go as it pleases; rather you can light it and extinguish it again like a pitchwood torch.

The knowledge of them has been lost, until a divinely gifted intellect will appear to decipher them again.

Despite the brightness it’s so cold that your breath turns into little clouds of vapor.

There are only a few moments when two things are possible, one path as much as another. Only a few moments when you can decide.