Quotes
List here any quote, from Carl Zuckmayer's book, A Piece of Myself. Quotes that inspire you, or give you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire the author's use of words ..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ...
We are reading A Part of Myself in celebration of Carl Zuckmayer's birthday: December 27, 1896. "One-half of life is luck; the other half is discipline - and that's the important half, for without discipline you wouldn't know what to do with luck." Des Teufels General: Ernst Udet and Carl Zuckmayer
I am not telling these stories as a warning or a lesson - men have never learned anything from the experiences of others, certainly not from those of earlier generations. I am telling them only in order to capture something that otherwise flows and flees away: life.
ReplyDeleteProbably revolution will always be horrible; but the horror may be borne, understood, assimilated, when it has sprung from genuine need, is conceived out of conviction and true intelligence, if what has brought matters to the boiling point is a true spiritual flame.
ReplyDeleteThe din of a world going down to its doom saturated the air.
ReplyDeleteI’ll never be happy again. I am absolutely indifferent to everything - whether I am here or anywhere else in the world. It will never change from now on.
ReplyDeleteBut it always does change. It changes as long as we live. Time certainly does not heal all wounds. But it teaches us a dialectic of change, of inescapable metamorphosis. The thesis of that dialectic is: the will to live. Its antithesis: despair. Its synthesis is friendship.
Rivers sustain the land and keep the earth in balance, for they connect the seas and make the network of communication within the continents. It is in riverland, in floodland, in the mist-dampened meadows along fruitful shores, that people have always settled, built their cities and markets, temples and churches. It is along rivers that trade routes and languages meet. To be in the stream of things means to stand amid the fullness of life.
ReplyDeleteIt is said that a child born on one of the seven nights between Christmas and the New Year, and what is more on a Sunday, can hear the animals talking.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that humiliating a man, even though he thoroughly deserves it, gives pleasure only to born underlings.
ReplyDeleteThe times press. Time presses. I hear it pounding in my chest, in my temples, in my head. One begins a book never knowing whether one will complete it. Whoever begins to live, consciously to live, and begins to think: ‘I am living . . .’ - whoever wakes up at night and cannot help thinking: ‘I am- I was- I will be . . .’ - feels himself dragged into a current so strong that it cannot be breasted by any swimmer, any more than the waves of the Rhine can flow back, flow upstream, uphill, back to their source.
ReplyDelete‘To a man between thirteen and thirty, no woman is unattainable.’
ReplyDeleteFor we were filled with a love that made us deaf and blind to everything else. That is a fact, we marched off to war like young lovers, and like lovers we had no notion of what was awaiting us. Like lovers who did not know the reality of love, who knew nothing about its bent for domination, its cruelty, and its power. So we plunged in: ardent, impetuous, intemperate, exalted. And again like lovers we were intoxicated with ourselves and our fancied irresistibility.
ReplyDeleteThe whole war remains in my memory as one great, inhuman loneliness - even when I was in the midst of people and longing to be alone.
ReplyDeleteMy awakening came at this same period. My head cleared. I began to think sharply, logically, soberly, without illusions or self-deceptions. The whole experience of the war, including the days of 1914, now seemed to me like a murky dream. Now I thought I saw through the whole thing. This war was not some destiny that had fallen upon us out of the clouds. It was the failure of a world, our world, the world of nation-state that had been in existence for some two hundred years. It was a universal suicide, a world’s end. I despised myself for my previous intoxication, while at the same time there was growing within me the new chiliastic intoxication, belief in the ‘war to end all wars’ in the coming springtime of nations, in a changed and better world.
ReplyDeleteWe agreed that we would meet at a certain entrance. As identification Carlo was to carry an issue of Das Tribunal and I the latest issue of Aktion; these we were to hold up against our chests like posters.
ReplyDeleteBoth of us, prone to anecdotal hyperbole, later used to recount that we had each forgotten our magazines, but that we had recognized each other anyhow, merely by the ‘smell of personality.’ A nice fictional touch, it was nevertheless basically true. We sniffed at one another like dogs or wolves of the same litter.
“only naked man could function as an artist; that was ecstasy, everything else nothing but stale bourgeois fraud. Tear artists’ clothes off to see if they’re authentic!’
ReplyDeleteThe ones who made the biggest fuss about ‘race’ were always those who were devoid of breeding.
ReplyDeleteA house, an apartment, is physical shell, a magical web, that keeps woe and pity at a distance and helps a person maintain his pride.
ReplyDeleteAddicts are missionaries, always out to capture the souls of others; they would like to make everyone believe that their church alone brings salvation.
ReplyDeleteHerbert Ihering, German theater critic talking about Brecht . . .
ReplyDelete‘A poet who would seem to portray decay and with this portrayal spreads light. Who would seem to be cynical, and with this cynicism moves our hearts. Who is young and has already seen all depths.’
There are times when you know in advance that you are going to be lucky, that whatever you lay a hand to will succeed.
ReplyDelete'When I hear the word culture, I cock my revolver.' (Hanns Johst)
ReplyDeleteDescription of atrocities . . . did not act as a check, but rather stimulated the instinct for cruelty present in man’s subconscious mind. It aroused a secret pleasure in imagining, inflicting, and suffering cruelty, and therefore would evoke the evil spirit once more.
ReplyDeleteTo be silent in this matter is not to veil facts, but to vanquish and go beyond them. Imagination is a deep and dire as well as a saving force. It is better not to awaken the diabolical elements slumbering in its depths. Let us rather seek its brighter regions, attune our hearing to its vox coelestis, its vox humana.
‘Eternal rights and external friendship should be confirmed and fixed in writing, since in the course of time past things are soon forgotten.’
ReplyDelete