The Hotel Years Quotes

“A puff of wind blew out their skirts, and they looked like two wandering flags.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“Dazzled by the luminosity of logic, she leans back, closing her eyes. She loses herself, she is lost.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“She wasn’t the first, nor the last. These are the women he crosses paths with. He doesn’t become her destiny, nor she his. They are his episodes, and luckily he too is just an episode. He wanders along on the fringes of danger, and nibbles at them.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“Perhaps one can see one’s destiny accomplished before one’s very eyes and still feel hungry.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“From time to time I think of describing the “German”, or defining his “typical” existence. Probably that isn’t possible. Even when I sense the presence of such a thing, I am unable to define it. What can I do, apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit? The describing of singularities within this profusion may be the least deceptive; the chance thing, plucked from a tangle of others, may most easily make for order. I have seen this and that; I have tried to write about what stuck in my senses and my memory.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“The conductor was eating a young ladies’ cinema nibble with a rigid, humourless expression, as though it was the doorstop or hunk of sausage that would have accorded with his personality.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“He wore a gleaming top hat. He had a pomaded, uptwirled black moustache. He looked like a first-class funeral.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“The calendrical harshness of nature is nothing to the boundless cruelty of history.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“It’s as though the inhabitants of the cities were outdistanced by the wisdom and the aspirations of the cities themselves. Things have a better feeling for the future than people do. People feel historically, i.e. retrospectively. Walls, streets, wires, chimneys feel prospectively. People get in the way of progress. They hang sentimental weights on the winged feet of time.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“But our tram needs its overhead wires, and the wires need long, bare, wooden poles, with a couple of china pots flowering at the top end, for purposes of electricity. A caricature of a snowdrop.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“But the policeman radiates the calm and ease of a traffic light;”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“His round cheeks are of a red that seems to glow from within, as if he had a lit candle in his mouth like a paper lantern at a summer fete.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“The woman who had escaped with her life now wept for the loss of her umbrella and was not at all grateful that her limbs were intact.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“When I leave the hotel the porter stands beside the revolving door, primed to greet me, like a talking fork.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“Of course, it’s the things you’re not told that arouse your interest. The gaps in the news are the interesting bits.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years

“No one is as cautious as an elderly mocker, especially when he knows how sensitive the local press and rotary club are.”
― Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years