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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don’t, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it—”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“With secret envy Christine thought: If only I could go back to taking pleasure in such little things, instead of yearning for the impossible.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“soothing silence instead of an oppressive one.”
― 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.”
― ستيفان زفايغ, 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

“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

“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