The Wall
Marlen Haushofer
Top 10 Best Quotes
“External freedom has probably never existed, but neither have I ever known anyone who knew inner freedom.”
“But if time exists only in my head, and I'm the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I'm owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.”
“Even now I’m nothing but a thin skin covering a mountain of memories.”
“Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain.”
“Imagination makes people oversensitive,vulnerable and exposed. Perhaps it's a form of degeneracy. I have never held the shortcomings of the unimaginative against them. Sometimes I've even envied them: they have an easier and more pleasant life than everyone else.”
“I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead.”
“I know that I, like every living thing, will have to die some day, but my hands, my feet and my guts still don’t know it, which is why death seems so unreal.”
“Since I’ve been living in the forest I don’t notice myself getting older. There’s nobody there to draw my attention to it, after all. Nobody tells me how I look, and I never give it a thought myself.”
“I barely gave my appearance a thought. My animals didn’t care about my outer shell, they certainly didn’t love me for my appearance. They probably had no sense of beauty whatsoever; I can’t imagine that a human being would have seemed beautiful to them.”
“Well, [the cat] had chosen this free life of her own accord. But had she really? After all, she couldn’t choose. I saw no great difference between her and myself. I could choose, certainly, but only with my mind, and as far as I was concerned that amounted to not being able to choose at all. The cat and I were made of the same stuff, and we were in the same boat, drifting with all living things toward the great dark rapids. As a human being, I alone had the honor of recognizing this, without being able to do anything about it. A dubious gift on the part of nature, if I thought about it.”
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Book Keywords:
self, mountain, aging, freedom, beauty, meaning, circle, made-up, vanity, memories, time, imagination, oneness, appearance, nature, superficial
