The Golem
Gustav Meyrink
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line. It is the same with all creatures. How could a chicken that is artificially hatched in an incubator immediately look for the right food, if the experience of millions of years were not stored inside it? The existence of 'instinct' indicates the presence of our ancestors in our bodies and in our souls.”
“It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body.”
“I have not let myself be stultified by science, whose highest goal is to furnish a `waiting room', which it would be best to tear down.”
“A brief rustling that broke off short, as if startled at itself, then deadly silence, that agonising, watchful hush, fraught with its own betrayal, that stretched each minute to an excruciating eternity.”
“You told me that a doctor used hypnotism to treat you, with the result that for a long time you lost the memory of your childhood and youth", he continued. "That is the characteristic—the stigma—of all those who have been 'bitten by the snake of the spiritual realm'. It seems almost as if, inside us, one life has to be grafted onto another, as a scion is grafted onto a wild tree, before the miracle of awakening can occur. The separation that usually comes with death is in our case achieved by erasing the memory, sometimes just by a sudden spiritual about-turn.”
“There is nothing mysterious about it at all. It is only magic and sorcery--kishuf--that frighten men; life itches and burns like a hairshirt, but the rays from the sun of the spiritual world are mild and warming.”
“for years a love that was too strong for my heart had gnawed at my mind until insanity had spread the soothing balm of oblivion over my wounded spirit.”
“Wherever I looked, there was nothing but drab despair around me, and I had a soul to match, all mangled and torn.”
“The stale air, the incessant, inane clatter of the billiard balls, the perpetual hacking cough of a half-blind journalist opposite me, the spindle-shanked infantry officer, alternately picking his nose or combing his moustache with nicotine-stained fingers in front of a small pocket-mirror, the seething clump of vile, sweaty, gabbling Italians round the card table in the corner, now rapping their knuckles and squawking as they played their trumps, now hawking up a lump of phlegm and spewing it onto the floor: all that was bad enough, but to see it reflected two, three times over in the mirrors on the walls! It slowly sucked the blood out of my veins.”
“Rosina is one of that red-haired tribe which is even more repulsive in its physical characteristics than the others; the men are pigeon-chested and have long, skinny necks with protuberant Adam's apples. Everything about them is freckled, and their whole life through they suffer the torments of lust, these men, and fight an unending, losing battle against their desires, on the rack of a constant, loathsome fear for their health.”
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Book Keywords:
mirrors, love, insanity, desires, phlegm, coffee-house, lust, red-haired-people, freckles, despair
