Selected Stories Quotes

“Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“Houses, gardens, and people were transfigured into musical sounds, all that was solid seemed to be transfigured into soul and into gentleness. Sweet veils of silver and soul-haze swam through all things and lay over all things. The soul of the world had opened, and all grief, all human disappointment, all evil, all pain seemed to vanish, from now on never to appear again. Earlier walks came before my eyes; but the wonderful image of the humble present became a feeling which overpowered all others. The future paled, and the past dissolved. I glowed and flowered myself in the glowing, flowering present. From near and far, great things and small things emerged bright silver with marvelous gestures, joys, and enrichments, and in the midst of this beautiful place I dreamed of nothing but this place itself. All other fantasies sank and vanished in meaninglessness. I had the whole rich earth immediately before me, and I still looked only at what was most small and most humble. With gestures of love the heavens rose and fell. I had become an inward being, and walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the fabulous depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good. What we understand and love understands and loves us also. I was no longer myself, was another, and yet it was on this account that I became properly myself. In the sweet light of love I realized, or believe I realized, that perhaps the inward self is the only self which really exists.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“Often I walked in the neighboring forest of fir and pine, whose beauties, wonderful winter solitudes, seemed to protect me from the onset of despair. Ineffably kind voices spoke down to me from the trees: 'You must not come to the hard conclusion that everything in the world is hard, false, and wicked. But come often to us; the forest likes you. In its company you will find health and good spirits again, and entertain more lofty and beautiful thoughts.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“In fact, I love all repose and all that reposes, all thrift and moderation, and am in my inmost self, unfriendly toward any haste and agitation.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“The soul of the world had opened and I fantasized that everything wicked, distressing and painful was on the point of vanishing...all notion of the future paled and the past dissolved. In the glowing present, I myself glowed.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“It doesn't take much to show love, but at some time or another in your, praise God, disastrous life you must have felt, honestly and simply, what love is and how love likes to behave.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“It is a very painful thing, having to part company with what torments you. And how mute the world is!”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“What honest man was never in his life without sustenance? And what human being has ever seen as the years pass his hopes, plans, and dreams completely undestroyed? Where is the soul whose longings and daring aspirations, whose sweet and lofty imaginings of happiness have been fulfilled without that soul's having had to deduct a discount?”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“On a far-wandering walk a thousand useful and usable thoughts occur to me, while shut in at home, I would lamentably wither and dry up. Walking is for me not only healthy, and lovely, it is also of service - not only lovely, but also useful. A walk advances me professionally, and provides me at the same time with amusement and joy; it conforts, delights and refreshes me, is a pleasure for me, but also has the peculiarity that it spurs me on and allures me to further creation, since it offers me as material numerous more or less significant objectivities upon which I can later work industriously at home. Every walk is filled with phenomena valuable to see and feel.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“The Job Application

Esteemed gentlemen,
I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? --I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life's boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am.--I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience.

Wenzel”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“To the devil with every miserable desire to seem more than one is”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“Can that be a human life, not to feel that one is moving on, toward the end? My life till now seems to have been fairly empty, and the certainty that it will remain empty gives a feeling of endlessness, a feeling which tells one to go to sleep, and to do only the most unavoidable things. So that is just what I do: I only pretend to work industriously when I detect behind me the smelly breath of my boss, creeping up to surprise me in my slothfulness. The breath which streams from him is his betrayer. The good man always provides me with a little distraction, so I really like him quite a lot. But what causes me to respect my duty and instructions so little? I am a small, pale, timid, weak, elegant, silly little fellow, full of unworldly feelings, and would not be able to endure the rigor of life if things ever went against me. Can the thought of losing my job, if I go on like this, inspire no fear in me? As it seems, it cannot; yet again, as it seems, it can. I am a bit afraid and a bit not afraid, too.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“I AM a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes. I am sinking and drying up a little. I am a bit scalded and scorched, yes, yes. That’s what it does to you. That’s life. I am not old, not in the least, certainly I am not eighty, by no means, but I am not sixteen any more either. Quite definitely I am a bit old and used up. That’s what it does to you. I am decaying a little, and I am crumbling, peeling a little. That’s life. Am I a little bit over the hill? Hmm! Maybe. But that doesn’t make me eighty, not by a long way. I am very tough, I can vouch for that. I am no longer young, but I am not old yet, definitely not. I am aging, fading a little, but that doesn’t matter; I am not yet altogether old, though I am probably a little nervous and over the hill. It’s natural that one should crumble a bit with the passage of time, but that doesn’t matter.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“I act uncommonly important when I read, look all around to see if people are noticing how cleverly someone there is improving his mind and wits; I slit open page after page at splendid leisure, do not even read any more but satisfy myself with having assumed the posture of a person immersed in a book. That is how I am: harebrained, and all for effect. I am vain, but my satisfaction with my vanity costs remarkably little.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“In the sweet light of love I believed I was able to recognize—or required to feel—that the inward self is the only self which really exists.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“Artists, as a rule, understand nothing about business, or, for some reason or other, they aren’t allowed to understand anything about it.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“Walk,' was my answer, 'I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world.... Without walking, I would be dead.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“Perhaps there were a few repetitions here and there. But I would like to confess that I consider nature and human life to be a lovely and charming flow of fleeting repetitions, and I would like further to confess that I regard this phenomenon as a beauty and a blessing.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“In the sweet light of love I realized, or believed I realized, that perhaps the inward self is the only self which really exists.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk

“Oh, it is heavenly and good and in simplicity most ancient to walk on foot, provided of course one’s shoes or boots are in order.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk

“I found myself, as I walked into the open, bright, and cheerful street, in a romantically adventurous state of mind, which pleased me profoundly.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk

“See how in the middle of winter love is radiant, brightness smiles, warmth shines, tenderness twinkles, and the glow of all that may be hoped for, all kindness, comes toward you.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“Както си вървях по пътя като скитник от сой, префинен вагабонд и нехранимайко или безделник и лентяй, покрай всякакви приятни градини, гъсто засадени с доволни зеленчуци, покрай цветя и мириси, покрай овощни дървета, бобени храсти и плетове, пълни с боб, покрай високо избуяли жита, като ръж, овес и пшеница, покрай сечище с дървен материал и стърготини, покрай сочна трева и кротко плискащ се ручей, рекичка или поток, както минавах леко и внимателно покрай всякакви хора, като милите, търгуващи на пазара жени, покрай украсената с радостни, тържествени знамена сграда на едно сдружение, както и покрай някои други добродушни, полезни неща, покрай особено красиво и мило, феерично ябълково дърво и покрай Господ знае още какво, например ягодови храсти и цветове, или по-добре, минавайки изискано край вече зрелите червени ягоди, междувременно зает постоянно с всякакви, повече или по-малко красиви мисли, защото при разходка съвсем от само себе си се вмъкват и намесват много хрумвания, искри и проблясъци, които едва ли могат да бъдат грижливо обработени, срещу мен се зададе един човек...”
― Роберт Валзер, The Walk and Other Stories

“I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in
a dream?
...
Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am. – I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience,

Wenzel”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“I think that one listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“En la continua necesidad de goce y prueba de cosas siempre nuevas se me antoja un rasgo de pequeñez, falta de vida interior, alejamiento de la Naturaleza y mediana o defectuosa capacidad de comprensión. Es a los niños pequeños a los que siempre hay que mostrarles algo nuevo y distinto para que no estén descontentos.”
― Robert Walser, The Walk and Other Stories

“The blood that soils your body becomes stars ...”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories