The Post-Office Girl Quotes

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Maybe everything’s not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you’ll discover your hidden resources.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“There’s an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can’t be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can’t add to it.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Has this new dress, this new world made me so different? Or was this inside me all along, and I was just too fainthearted, too timid? That’s what Mother always said. Maybe everything’s not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you’ll discover your hidden resources.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“See, that’s what we’re like. You’re brave and you’re not afraid to die, but you’re afraid of being late for work. That’s how enslaved we are, that’s how ingrained it is.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“the natural animosity between those who slept and those who were stirring in the sleeping city.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Poverty was crushing all the feeling they had. It was intolerable to be together this way, and yet they tolerated it.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel’s disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“She tries to think, but the monotonous stuttering of the wheels breaks the flow of her thoughts, and the narcotic cowl of sleep tightens over her throbbing forehead—that muffled and yet overpowering railroad-sleep in which one lies rapt and benumbed as though in a shuddering black coal sack made of metal.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Electricity moves at a speed greater than thought, a speed too great for thought to grasp. These twelve words, which have landed like a white, soundless thunderbolt in the airless humidity of the Austrian post office, were written only minutes before and three countries away, in the cold blue shadow of glaciers, under the clear violet Engadine sky, and the ink was not even dry on the telegraph form when the message, the summons, burst upon a bewildered consciousness.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“She goes to the window, curious to look out, and her senses awaken. It was only a moment ago (for sleep knows no time) that the flat horizon was a loamy gray swell merging into the fog behind the icy glass. But now rocky, powerful mountains are massing out of the ground (where have they come from?), a vast, strange overwhelming sight. This is her first glimpse of the unimaginable majesty of the Alps, and she sways with surprise. Just now a first ray of sun through the pass to the east is shattering into a million reflections on the ice field covering the highest peak. The white purity of this unfiltered light is so dazzling and sharp that she has to close her eyes for a moment, but now she's wide awake. One push and the window bangs down, to bring this marvel closer, and fresh air - ice-cold, glass-sharp, and with a bracing dash of snow - streams through her lips, parted in astonishment, and into her lungs, the deepest, purest breath of her life. She spreads her arms to take in this first reckless gulp, and immediately, her chest expanding, feels a luxurious warmth rise through her veins - marvelous, marvelous. Inflamed with cold, she takes in the scene to the left and the right; her eyes (thawed out now) follow each of the granite slops up to the icy epaulet at the top, discovering, with growing excitement, new magnificence everywhere - here a white waterfall tumbling headlong into a valley, there neat little stone houses tucked into crevices like birds' nests, farther off an eagle circling proudly over the very highest heights, and above it all a wonderfully pure, sumptuous blue whose lush, exhilarating power she would never have thought possible. Again and again she returns to these Alps sprung overnight from her sleep, an incredible sight to someone leaving her narrow world for the first time. These immense granite mountains must have been here for thousands of years; they'll probably still be here millions and millions of years from now, every one of them immovably where it's always been, and if not for the accident of this journey, she herself would have died, rotted away, and turned to dust with no inkling of their glory, She's been living as though all this didn't exist, never saw it, hardly cared to; like a fool she dozed off in this tiny room, hardly longer than her arm, hardly wide enough for her feet, just a night away, a day away from this infinitude, these manifold immensities! Indifferent and without desires before, now she's beginning to realize what she's been missing. This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel's disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“It’s not your fault. But whose fault is it? Why are we always the ones who suffer? We didn’t do anything, we didn’t do anything to anyone, but every step we take is a trap.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“But you wouldn’t believe what a dead finger does to a living hand.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“soothing silence instead of an oppressive one.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“When I go looking for work, I've got nothing more to show for myself than some glorified apprentice or teenage layabout, and when I see my face in the mirror, I look forty. No, we came into the world at a bad time..”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post Office Girl

“You're wrong, she said. I know exactly what you are saying, every word of it. That is... A year ago, even a few months ago, maybe I wouldn't have understood you, but since I got back from...”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“He stood up too, looking almost distressed. And she was pleased and moved to see that he found it hard to break off their conversation. Tonight he'll be alone, she thought, and she felt a kind of pride: here at last, unexpectedly, after all this time, was someone who wanted to win her over; she, an insignificant postal official who sold stamps, dated telegrams, and made telephone connections, meant something to someone.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post Office Girl

“Again she feels his ominous grip as a fluttering in her nerves. She smiles weakly, frightened by the ambush and yet pleased that just half an hour was enough for him to miss her so much.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Nonsense, no need for that... I'm not a schoolgirl anymore... Always this stupid worrying! I don't need permission to run down for three minutes...
So she hurries downstairs uneasily, as though trying to outrace her own hesitation..”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“There would have been no harm in it in the end. I could have had dinner with him as he proposed... That's how people get to know each other.. But I was worried, I'd be late getting home... I've had that silly worry all my life and I've shown consideration for everyone, everyone... And time goes by and you start to get crow's feet... The rest of them were smart, they understood things better... Really, would any other girl be sitting alone in this room, with the lights blazing downstairs and all the fun going on.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated. Whether you know it or not,;any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“He's like a Koranic calligrapher who loves the handwriting with its delicate curves and shading, for the mute joy of it. Its silent expressive flair. For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidized flat, books are like flowers.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“And for the first time she has a feeling: too late, toil has exhausted her youth, the war has taken it away. Something must have snapped inside her, and men seem to sense it, for she isn't really being pursued by any of them, even though her delicate blond profile has an aristocratic look among the coarse faces, round and red like apples, of the village girls. But these postwar seventeen-and eighteen-year-old aren't waiting quietly and patiently, waiting for someone to want them and take them.
They're demanding pleasure as their right, demanding it as impetuously a though it's not just their own young lives that they're living but the lives of the hundred thousand dead and buried too. With a kind of horror, Christine now twenty six watches how they act, these newcomers, these young ones, sees their self-assurance and covetousness, their knowing and impudent eyes, the provocation in their hips, how unmistakably they laugh on matter how boldly the boys embrace them and how shamelessly they take the men off into the woods_she sees them on her way home. It disgusts her, Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete.
No more struggling, no more striving, that's the main thing! Breathe calmly, daydream quietly, do your work, water the flowers in the window, ask not, want not,. No more asking for anything, nothing new, nothing exciting. The war stole her decade of youth.
She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Kẻ nào quá sung sướng, kẻ ấy thường mất khả năng quan sát. Những người hạnh phúc là những nhà tâm lý học tồi. Chỉ có sự lo âu mới làm trí óc con người trở nên sắc sảo đến mức tối đa. Chỉ có cảm giác về sự nguy hiểm đang rình rập mới bắt con người trở nên sáng suốt và minh mẫn hơn.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“She sits with shoulders slumped, staring at the wall, waiting for an answer, waiting to feel some joy. She's holding her breath without knowing it, listening to her body like a pregnant woman, listening, bending down deep into herself. But nothing stirs, everything is silent and empty like a forest when no birds are singing. She tries harder, this twenty-eight-year-old woman, to remember what it is to be happy, and with alarm she realizes that she no longer knows, that it's like a foreign language she learned in childhood but has now forgotten, remembering only that she knew it once. When was the last time I was happy? She thinks hard, and two little lines are etched in her bowed forehead. Gradually it comes to her: an image as though from a dim mirror, a thin-legged blond girl, her schoolbag swinging above her short cotton skirt. A dozen other girls are swirling about her: it's a game of rounders in a park in suburban Vienna. A surge of laughter, a bright trill of high spirits following the ball into the air, now she remembers how light, how free that laughter felt, it was never far away, it tickled under her skin, it swirled through her blood; one shake and it would spill out over her lips, it was so free, almost too free: on the school bench you had to hug yourself and bite your lip to keep from laughing at some funny remark or silliness in French class. Any little thing would set off waves of that effervescent girlish laughter. A teacher who stammered, a funny face in the mirror, a cat chasing its tail, a look from an officer on the street, any little thing, any tiny, senseless bit of nonsense, you were so full of laughter that anything could bring it out. It was always there and ready to erupt, that free, tomboyish laughter, and even when she was asleep, its high-spirited arabesque was traced on her young mouth.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“Christine's heart is thumping wildly. She lets herself be led (her aunt means her nothing but good) into a tiled and mirrored room full of warmth and sweetly scented with mild floral soap and sprayed perfumes; an electrical apparatus roars like a mountain storm in the adjoining room. The hairdresser, a brisk, snub-nosed Frenchwoman, is given all sorts of instructions, little of which Christine understands or cares to. A new desire has come over her to give herself up, to submit and let herself be surprised. She allows herself to be seated in the comfortable barber's chair and her aunt disappears. She leans back gently, and, eyes closed in a luxurious stupor, senses a mechanical clattering, cold steel on her neck, and the easy incomprehensible chatter of the cheerful hairdresser; she breathes in clouds of fragrance and lets aromatic balms and clever fingers run over her hair and neck. Just don't open your eyes, she thinks. If you do, it might go away. Don't question anything, just savor this Sundayish feeling of sitting back for once, of being waited on instead of waiting on other people. Just let our hands fall into your lap, let good things happen to you, let it come, savor it, this rare swoon of lying back and being ministered to, this strange voluptuous feeling you haven't experienced in years, in decades. Eyes closed, feeling the fragrant warmth enveloping her, she remembers the last time: she's a child, in bed, she had a fever for days, but now it's over and her mother brings some sweet white almond milk, her father and her brother are sitting by her bed, everyone's taking care of her, everyone's doing things for her, they're all gentle and nice. In the next room the canary is singing mischievously, the bed is soft and warm, there's no need to go to school, everything's being done for her, there are toys on the bed, though she's too pleasantly lulled to play with them; no, it's better to close her eyes and really feel, deep down, the idleness, the being waited on. It's been decades since she thought of this lovely languor from her childhood, but suddenly it's back: her skin, her temples bathed in warmth are doing the remembering. A few times the brisk salonist asks some question like, 'Would you like it shorter?' But she answers only, 'Whatever you think,' and deliberately avoids the mirror held up to her. Best not to disturb the wonderful irresponsibility of letting things happen to you, this detachment from doing or wanting anything. Though it would be tempting to give someone an order just once, for the first time in your life, to make some imperious demand, to call for such and such. Now fragrance from a shiny bottle streams over her hair, a razor blade tickles her gently and delicately, her head feels suddenly strangely light and the skin of her neck cool and bare. She wants to look in the mirror, but keeping her eyes closed in prolonging the numb dreamy feeling so pleasantly. Meanwhile a second young woman has slipped beside her like a sylph to do her nails while the other is waving her hair. She submits to it all without resistance, almost without surprise, and makes no protest when, after an introductory 'Vous etes un peu pale, Mademoiselle,' the busy salonist, employing all manner of pencils and crayons, reddens her lips, reinforces the arches of her eyebrows, and touches up the color of her cheeks. She's aware of it all and, in her pleasant detached stupor, unaware of it too: drugged by the humid, fragrance-laden air, she hardly knows if all this happening to her or to some other, brand-new self. It's all dreamily disjointed, not quite real, and she's a little afraid of suddenly falling out of the dream.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl