Masquerade and Other Stories Quotes

“When we realize that words can destroy something good, wonderful, and dear, and that by keeping silent we can avoid causing the least damage or harm, it’s easy to stay silent.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“How uninteresting interesting things can become.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“That lovely things exist is a lovely thought.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“Listening to music, I always have exactly the same feeling: something’s missing. Never will I learn the cause of this gentle sadness, never will I wish to investigate it.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“Questions are usually more beautiful, more significant than their resolutions, which in fact never resolve them, are never sufficient to satisfy us, whereas from a question streams a wonderful fragrance.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“That's what's so miraculous about the city: each person's bearing and behavior vanish among these thousand sorts, observations are fleeting, judgements swift, and forgetting inevitable.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“Money rules the world, and doubtless also, here and there, the bit of love within it, and when love turns to hate, one remembers unpaid board.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“Wallets can establish connections and change opinions. Things that fall apart can be glued back by money with astonishing alacrity.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“[…] we humans, as long as we live, are generally incapable of freeing ourselves from a certain ardent searching and longing, and should not even strive to; that our longing for happiness seems far more beautiful, always far more sensitive, more significant and all in all probably far more desirable than happiness itself, which perhaps need not even exist, since the fervent, gratifying pursuit of happiness and an everlasting, deep desire for it perhaps not only suit perfectly our needs, but satisfy them far better, far more profoundly; that being happy is by no means to be taken casually, unquestioningly as the meaning of the world, the goal and purpose of life, and so on.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“More people perish than want to. Death comes running with astonishing speed, strikes his victims with marvelous accuracy. These include generals, doctors, governesses, soldiers, policemen, ministers. None of them pass away peacefully, as it says in the newspapers. Their executions are violent enough.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“Wherever poesie can be felt, all poetic touches are superfluous.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“A girl sitting with us in the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“God is the opposite of Rodin.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“[…] there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“Quite solemnly I told myself: "even though I'm still undecided at present and appear to be an idle pleasure-seeker par excellence, this is no reason to doubt that perhaps soon a time will come when I'll be firm resolution itself and ready to take on the full harshness, the utter nakedness, of life just as bravely as the next fellow."
I was not a little proud of this monologue.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories