The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig Quotes

“He sensed the presence of death, he sensed the presence of undying love: something broke open inside him, and he thought of the invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate, as one might think of distant music.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“She could be lively only in the midst of life; in isolation she dwindled to a shadow.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“He lived one of those lives that seem otiose because they are not linked to any community of interest, because all the riches stored in them by a thousand separate valuable experiences will pass when their last breath is drawn, without anyone to inherit them.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“And the child—your child—was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“My child died last night—and now I shall be alone again, if I must really go on living. They will come tomorrow, strange, hulking, black-clad men bringing a coffin, and they will put him in it, my poor boy, my only child.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“He felt that it was a mistake to look for signs and portents instead of waiting until they were revealed to him in their own good time.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“dreams are like delicate little white flowers that will be blown away at the first breath of reality?”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“A well-chosen tie could make me almost merry; a good book, an excursion in a motor car or an hour with a woman left me fully satisfied. It particularly pleased me to ensure that this way of life, like a faultlessly correct suit of English tailoring, did not make me conspicuous in any way. I believe I was considered pleasant company, I was popular and welcome in society, and most who knew me called me a happy man.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“That...that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting...but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistance.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“Do you still have all the ideals, all the ideals that you took to that distant world with you? Are they all still intact, or have some of them died or withered away? Haven’t they been torn out of you by force and flung in the dirt, where thousands of wheels carrying vehicles to their owners’ destination in life crushed them? Or have you lost none of them?”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“L’amour coûte cher aux vieillards—I think that was the title of one of Balzac’s most moving stories, and many could be written on the subject. But the old people who know most about it are happy”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“I told you before that he had the magical gift of graphically expressing everything he felt in movement and gesture. But nothing,
nothing on earth could convey despair, total self-surrender, death in the midst of life to such shattering effect as his immobility, the way he sat there in the falling rain, not moving, feeling nothing, too tired to rise and walk the few steps to the shelter of the projecting roof, utterly indifferent to his own existence.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“Her words came tumbling out in pursuit of the images hurrying through her mind.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“Its radiant glow seemed much lighter and happier than this northern sky of eternal grey cloud.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“had he been only a hardworking craftsman all his life, fitting colours together as a labourer constructs a building out of stones?”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“Now they both smiled. The sweet, light fragrance of a first youthful, half-unspoken love, with all its intoxicating tenderness, had awoken in them like a dream on which you reflect ironically when you wake, although you really wish for nothing more than to dream it again, to live in the dream. The beautiful dream of young love that ventures only on half-measures, that desires and dares not ask, promises and does not give. They”
― Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig