97 Quotes by Robert Walser

I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad.

I was, I remember, nineteen years old, wrote poems, still wore no proper collar, ran out in the rain and snow, always woke up early in the morning, read Lenau, considered an overcoat a superfluous item, received a monthly salary of one hundred twenty-five francs and didn’t know what to do with all that money.

Everything that’s forbidden lives a hundred times over; thus, if something is supposed to be dead, its life is all the livelier.

We grasp one thing after another, and when we have grasped a thing, it is as if it possessed us. Not we possess it, but the opposite: whatever we have apparently acquired rules over us then. It is impressed upon us that a beneficent effect is to be had from acquiring a little that is firm and definite, that is to say, from growing accustomed and shaping oneself to laws and commands that prescribe a strict external discipline. Perhaps we’re being stupefied, certainly we’re being made small.

I imagine that it would be unspeakably lovely to die with the terrible knowledge that I have offended whosoever I love the most and have filled them with bad opinions of me.

I act uncommonly important when I read, look all around to see if people are noticing how cleverly someone there is improving his mind and wits; I slit open page after page at splendid leisure, do not even read any more but satisfy myself with having assumed the posture of a person immersed in a book. That is how I am: harebrained, and all for effect. I am vain, but my satisfaction with my vanity costs remarkably little.

Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another’s loneliness strange.

I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called “the world,” and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.

I cannot live and at the same time despise my life. I must find myself a life, a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life.