The Scorpion Quotes

“During these years her moods alternated like sun and showers in April. She longed to be dead, or to come of age, to be alive in another century, or some other part of the earth, to be a nun or so beautiful as to ravish the entire world.”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“She did not wish to die. Or rather, she would gladly have died, if it had not involved being dead.”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“We live— and we don't know how! We love—and we don't know why! We die—and we don't know when!”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“Usually we miss our best friends by a century or two. We know some by reading about them or seeing their pictures. But that is all: of those who will be born after us, we know nothing.”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“For the first few months everything went splendidly. That is the most unhappy part of an unhappy love—it always begins with an extravagant happiness.”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“I have an antipathy to dogs, not because they are faithful, but because they are shameless. Because they carry on their love affairs on the street.” Again that crimson flush overspread her features. “Cats are more cultured about such things—if I may use that much misused word. There are insects that mate only in the darkest nights, in the most forsaken corners, so that no forester has ever succeeded in observing them. I've always held that there will come a time when we will speak of the barbarous practices of this century, or the last ten centuries, as if they were a fairy-tale. Just think how tremendously funny it must strike any sensitive person when two people, having conceived a certain desire to go to bed with one another, set a special date for the event. They inform certain public institutions, the State, the Church. They tell their friends and relations, their own parents, their own brothers and sisters. On the day which is to end in that night, they gather everybody they know about them, let themselves be observed by persons who stuff themselves and drink until they are sick, listen to suggestive songs and suggestive speeches—and yet do not get sick themselves. I've always had a feeling that marriage as it is practiced today would be fit punishment for a hardened criminal. It is such a cruel, such an exquisite torture. Metta, my child, oblige me and if you ever decide to marry, do it when you desire and not on some appointed day. Do it in utter secrecy so that no living soul can suspect the possibility of such a thing....”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“Promise me one thing,” she said softly with a quality in her voice as of joylessness which nothing could ever animate again. ““When I am dead, put flowers on my grave. Not at my funeral and not a large bought wreath.
“I like to imagine how I'll receive visits, how I'll lie there and sleep. I love graveyards so—generally those that are a little run down. I don’t want any well groomed gaudy grave—but a gray stone, half sunk already and half overgrown with ivy. Then the beautiful woman in the white dress who stops before it will think of me for a moment, not with grief, but with a gentle melancholy, and will strew a handful of flowers over me. I’ll feel them, oh, make no mistake, I’ll feel them!”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“I would die of shame if I thought that only the nerve-endings in our skin vibrate. Don’t you feel that something has happened to your soul that must remain with it beyond all death? Don’t you feel that this hour has changed you beyond any power of death to change?” “Yes,” said Metta. “And more than any birth. I was born today—not twenty years ago. Now I can say to my- self for the first time consciously: “I live!” ‘We live!” said Olga, clasping her to her, with an exultation in her voice that was like the jubilant cry of a wild bird rising in flight.
“We live, sweetheart! Forever, and ever, and ever, we live!”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“Comrade,” she thought, “a beautiful, a dear word. Comrade! I would like to be that, and I can be. Comradeship. That is my strength.”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion

“It is a great art, indeed, to know how to end. At the right time. And in the right way.”
― Anna Elisabet Weirauch, The Scorpion