The Loser Quotes
"Horowitz rendered all our professors null and void."
"The majority of even the most famous piano players haven’t a clue about their art."
"We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones."
"All schools are bad and the one we attend is always the worst if it doesn’t open our eyes."
"To recommend country life to a city person so that he can stay alive is a dirty internist’s trick."
"We become contemptible when we go past fifty and are still living, continue our existence."
"Glenn refused all the invitations, all the highest fees. He always talked people out of the idea that he was an unhappy person, he claimed he was the happiest, the most blessed by happiness."
"We exist, we don’t have any other choice. It’s total nonsense what we have to go through."
"To exist means nothing other than we despair."
"No word has turned my stomach more than the word socialism when I think what people have done to this term."
"Parents know very well that they perpetuate their own unhappiness in their children, they go about it cruelly by having children and throwing them into the existence machine."
"We run away from one thing into the other and destroy ourselves in the process."
"Glenn was always afraid of the dampness of Austrian restaurants, he feared death would claim him in these Austrian restaurants."
"The thought that I had come to Wankham merely to see Wertheimer’s hunting lodge struck me at that moment as base."
"Curiosity, which has always been my most prominent character trait, had taken a firm grip on me."
"No one ever cast a more damaging light on his relatives than Wertheimer, described them into the dirt."
"I first saw Wertheimer in the Nussdorferstrasse, in front of the Markthalle."
"Glenn’s death drove home his own failure with furious clarity."
"All our lives we run away from amateurishness and it always catches up with us."
"We think we have a friend and in time see we don’t have a friend at all, since we have absolutely no one, that’s the truth."
"Wertheimer’s head was more like mine than Glenn’s, Glenn had an absolute virtuoso head on his shoulders, unlike Wertheimer and me, who had intellectual heads."
"The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people."
"Whoever commits suicide never commits suicide at the perfect moment, whereas a so-called natural death always occurs at the perfect moment."
"He wanted to publish a book, but it never came to that, for he kept changing his manuscript, changing it so often and to such an extent that nothing was left of the manuscript."
"Our great philosophers, our greatest poets, shrivel down to a single successful sentence."
"The so-called intellectual consumes himself in what he considers pathbreaking work and in the end has only succeeded in making himself ridiculous."
"But everything we say is nonsense, no matter what we say it is nonsense and our entire life is a single piece of nonsense."
"Whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously, and whoever can’t laugh like Glenn doesn’t deserve to be taken as seriously as Glenn."
"Every day I put on a new head, so he said, whereas the world thinks it’s still the old one."
"Basically I hate nature, he said again and again."
"Our existence consists in always being against nature and setting to work against nature until we give up, for nature is stronger than we are."
"The ideal piano player is the one who wants to be the piano."
"To be the best or not at all has always been my motto, in every respect."
"All his life Glenn had wanted to be the Steinway itself."
"We don’t have to be a genius to be a unique and autonomous being and to be able to recognize that."
"Every person is a unique and autonomous person and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time."
"Weak characters never turn into anything more than weak artists."
"Again and again we try to escape ourselves, but we fail in our efforts."
"The uncertainty of man is his nature, is his desperation."
"Many people are basically happy because they’re up to their necks in unhappiness."
"A concertistic life is the most horrible imaginable, no matter whose, it’s awful to play the piano before an audience."
"The funerals that aren’t supposed to be noticed are scheduled for five o’clock in the morning."
"A sudden end. I’m going to Traich immediately."
"Naturally I could only give her a fragmentary report."
"Never before in its history has our country sunk so low."
"Marriage was out of the question now, it’s better to be alone."
"But we can leave our place of birth if it threatens to suffocate us."
"In theory we understand people, but in practice we can’t put up with them."
"We’re not unhappy when people become suspects and are charged with a crime and locked up."
"Suicides are ridiculous, the ones who hang themselves are the most disgusting."
"All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them."
"We constantly portray and judge people only in false terms, we judge them unjustly and portray them meanly."
"The actual starting point has to be Horowitz’s course."
"One might just be happy a few times a year in this city, walking across the Kohlmarkt or the Graben, strolling down the Singerstrasse in the spring air."
"By writing about the one (Glenn Gould), I will order my thoughts about the other (Wertheimer)."
"We see a structure and believe it is ideal for us (and for people like us) and it's absolutely not ideal for our purposes and for the purposes of people like us."
"Just as we see a person as the ideal one for us, whereas he is everything but ideal for us."
"The woodsman Franz, whom I knew, greeted me. He had just heard about Wertheimer’s suicide that morning, everybody was horrified, he said."
"Wertheimer had been exuberant with them, which by the way Franz had also noticed, he became a totally different person in their company during those days and weeks."
"Finally Wertheimer had a king’s meal, as Franz put it, brought up to the large dining room for all these people and told them that they all had to be gone the next morning."
"He, Franz, began cleaning up the mess immediately and without delay."
"The piano was an Ehrbar and worth nothing. And it was, as I noticed right away, totally out of tune, an amateur’s instrument through and through."
"Art should be given the chance to phase itself out."
"Everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death."