Love. The Legacy of Cain Quotes

“Everything was silent. Only man was awake in his misery, laboring in the sweat of his brow for the sake of this absurd existence that he passionately loves and despises in equal measure.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“Nature wants to propogate our race. What else would it want. We, however, are vain and gullible enough to convince ourselves that it has our happiness in mind.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“The pupils of her eyes widened, her nostrils trembled, and when she pressed up against him tenderly and began kissing him, she bared her teeth, a graceful predator in all her unfettered cruelty.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“   'And you are the first woman I've ever loved,' he continued calmly. 'I love you so much that it makes me suffer, but I'm not suffering because I can't possess you. I'm suffering because it's impossible for me to love you. It tears my heart apart that such a magnificent nature has resulted in such an ugly character.'   ”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“   She is aristocratic when she rides, jumping boldly over ditches and hedges, but who admires her? Certainly not her husband. He'd just despise her if she were cowardly. On the contrary: he reminds her to think of her children.
   So she feels like an actor who is expected to act without an audience and ends up gnashing her teeth in rage and crying into her pillow during her sleepless nights.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“Whenever the women would talk about their daughters or other girls, about their future or their material prospects, the only thing they'd think of was marriage, the same way people talk about a man's job or office.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“My boredom also turned into melancholy, the melancholy that is so peculiar to us Little Russians, a manly yielding to the feeling of necessity. And my boredom was as necessary as sleep and death.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“   I was soon bored, for my friend Moschku had his hands full with serving his guests with brandy and gossip, and only seldom did he hop over the bar to my table, sink his verbal claws into me, and attempt a learned conversation about politics and literature.
   I was bored even without that and looked around the room.
   Its basic color was green.
   The frugally trimmed petroleum lamp filled the room with greenish light. Green mold lay on the walls, the great rectangular oven was lacquered green, and green moss grew out of Israel's fieldstone floor. Green sediment in the schnaps glasses, green oxidation on the small tin measuring glasses that the peasants drank out of when they walked up and put their copper coins down on the bar. A green vegetation covered the cheese that Moschku placed in front of me, and his wife was sitting behind the oven in a yellow nightgown with bluish green flowers and rocking her pale green child. Green in the Jew's careworn face, green around his small, restless eyes, around his thin, motionless nostrils, and in the mockingly twisted, sour corners of his mouth.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“I began to grasp the meaning of creation. I saw that death and life were not so much enemies as friendly comrades, not opposites that negate each other, but rather as variations of nature, each flowing out of the other. I felt myself detached from the world. Death no longer seemed terrible to me; indeed, it appeared less so than life. And the more I became submerged in myself, the more everything about me became alive and expressive and touched my soul.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain

“And these six things: love, property, the state, war, work, and death, are the legacy of Cain, who slew his brother and whose brother's blood cried out to heaven, and the Lord spake to Cain: 'You shall be cursed upon the earth and a fugitive and a vagabond.' ”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Love. The Legacy of Cain