What I Saw Quotes

“[O]ur relationship with nature has become warped. You see, nature has acquired a purpose where we are concerned. Its task is to amuse us. It no longer exists for its own sake.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Astonishing, really, that they still look human. They ought to look like megaphones, like screams, like brutal desires, like beery ecstasies... like decadent barism. But the unconscious drive to remain in God's image seems to be so strong that not even the six-day races can quite eradicate it.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Is a people that elects as its president an icon that has never read a book all that far away from burning books itself?”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Domestic interior design is a fraught affair. It makes me hanker for the mild and soothing and tasteless red velvet interiors in which people lived so undiscriminatingly no more than twenty years ago. It was unhygienic, dark, cool, probably stuffed full of dangerous bacteria, and pleasant.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Somebody cracks a joke, a whole row laughs, one witticism sets off another, and, like matches, they flare up and burn down.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Above all there's a lack of personal discipline, manners, decorum, natural discretion. If everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don't see it that way, not even in a moment of danger. As they see it they are bound always to be the other's enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things. Sending experts into other countries won't help much, so long as each individual refuses to work out his own personal traffic plan. There is a wisdom in the accident of language by which there is a single word, "traffic," for movement in the streets, and for people's dealings with one another.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Als hätte es noch eines Beweises bedurft, dass wird das geduldigste unter den Völkern der Welt sind – oder boshaft und medizinisch ausgedrückt: ein masochistisches. Wie in der Geschichte Berlins Absolutismus und Korruption, Tyrannei und Spekulation, Prügelstrafe und Bodenwucher, Grausamkeit und Gewinnsucht, Maskerade einer harten Korrektheit und windiger Schacher Schulter an Schulter Fundamente graben und Straßen bauen, und wie also aus Unkenntnis, Geschmacklosigkeit, Unglück, Bosheit und nur in selten günstigem Zufall die Hauptstadt des Deutschen Reiches entsteht, erzählt in fesselnder Weise Werner Hegemanns Buch ‚Das steinerne Berlin’.”
― Joseph Roth, Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger

“I have come to know one or two apartments near certain stations really quite well. It’s as if I’d often been to visit there, and I have a feeling I know how the people who live there talk and move. They all have a certain amount of noise in their souls from the constant din of passing trains, and they’re quite incurious, because they’ve gotten used to the fact that every minute countless other lives will glide by them, leaving no trace. There is always an invisible, impenetrable strangeness between them and the world alongside. They are no longer even aware of the fact that their days and their doings, their nights and their dreams, are all filled with noise. The sounds seem to have come to rest on the bottom of their consciousness, and without them no impression, no experience the people might have, feels complete.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“I have come to know one or two apartments near certain stations really
quite well. It’s as if I’d often been to visit there, and I have a feeling I know
how the people who live there talk and move. They all have a certain
amount of noise in their souls from the constant din of passing trains, and
they’re quite incurious, because they’ve gotten used to the fact that every
minute countless other lives will glide by them, leaving no trace.
There is always an invisible, impenetrable strangeness between them and
the world alongside. They are no longer even aware of the fact that their
days and their doings, their nights and their dreams, are all filled with noise.
The sounds seem to have come to rest on the bottom of their consciousness,
and without them no impression, no experience the people might have, feels
complete.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Actors, who relate their woes in many clever sentences and with much waving of hands and rolling of eyes—they should be made to ride in the cars for passengers with heavy loads, to learn that a slightly bent hand can hold in it the misery of all time, and that the quiver of an eyelid can be more moving than a whole evening full of crocodile tears.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933