The Wall Quotes
"I shall set everything down as precisely as I can."
"All reports probably suffer from this shortcoming."
"There’s no one here to think and care for me. I’m quite alone."
"Fear creeps up on me from all sides, and I don’t want to wait until it gets to me and overpowers me."
"A tiny, gold watch, really nothing but an expensive toy that never showed the right time."
"He was so wealthy that he needed to do something special."
"He was a bad shot, and loathed shooting innocent deer."
"I was very fond of him, and shared his love of the forest and a few quiet days in the hunting lodge."
"Otherwise, he was thoroughly cultured, tactful and bad at cards."
"On the thirtieth of April the Rüttlingers invited me to drive with them to the hunting lodge."
"The hunting lodge is actually a two-story wooden villa, built out of massive branches and still in good condition today."
"I can’t see anything that could have made our coexistence a happy one."
"The following morning wasn’t as unbearable as the previous morning had been."
"It wasn’t the first day of my life that I had had to survive like this."
"I had to stay quite calm and simply get through it."
"I don’t think they were fantasies either, since it was far less likely that I could help the animals to survive in the middle of the forest than that they would die."
"Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden."
"I have always considered the cyclamen a strange and rather frightening flower."
"As soon as I’d cut the first few swathes I realized that the rhythm hadn’t left me, and relaxed my cramped muscles."
"I don’t think my behavior was due to any weakness or sentimentality — I was simply following an instinct that had been implanted in me."
"But I would rather turn to the second of July, the day I realized my life depended on the number of matches I had left."
"Sometimes I brushed Bella with Hugo’s nylon brush. She was very partial to that, and stood quite still."
"I have no idea I’m doing it until something startles me and I fall silent."
"The only creature in the forest that can really do right or wrong is me. And I alone can show mercy."
"It calmed me down, and contact with the familiar, dirty characters diverted me from my thoughts."
"I was quite alone with my cards and my fear."
"Thoughts fell upon me like a swarm of hornets."
"I only dreamed about dead people, for even in my dreams I knew there were no more living people."
"In the daytime I was tired and dejected, and Lynx made desperate attempts to cheer me up."
"It was a good thing that I was obliged to devote more time to Bella, who had grown so fat."
"The composure with which I had adapted to my situation from the first day had only been a kind of anesthetic."
"Fears of the past and dead things that I couldn’t bring back to life, which held me at their mercy in the darkness of night."
"It’s terribly hard to do justice to one’s own past."
"I tried to be just, to distort nothing, and to run nothing down."
"I felt better than I had done for several weeks."
"I was going to reach my hand out to her but I went back to sleep and slept dreamlessly until morning."
"I lay on the bench, and when I closed my eyes I saw snowy mountains on the horizon."
"I must take care of myself and be stricter with myself than I was before."
"Loving and looking after another creature is a very troublesome business, and much harder than killing and destruction."
"The nights in the pasture were always too short... The night wasn’t dark at all. It was beautiful, and I started to love it."
"For the first time in my life I was calm, not content or happy, but calm."
"The meadow was quite still, covered with transparent drops which later, gleamed in rainbow colors."
"All day long the hut door stood open and the sunlight fell onto my bed."
"I got to know all the stars; although I didn’t know their names they soon grew familiar."
"The night, which had always frightened me, lost all its terror in the Alm."
"Even when it rained... I knew that the stars were there, red, green, yellow and blue. They were always there, even during the day, when I couldn’t see them."
"Violent as these storms were, the sky was clear the next morning."
"I sometimes thought I would never fully understand what had come over me in the Alm."
"Human beings had played their own games, and in almost every case they had ended badly."
"I sometimes see things before I can categorize and recognize them. The impression is frightening and menacing."
"I'm a bad robot; I'm still a human being who thinks and feels, and I shall not be able to shake either habit."
"If I’m defenseless dreams can assail me, black dreams of night."
"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."
"A dubious gift on the part of nature, if I thought about it."
"I was probably able to live only because I could always escape into family life."
"I bear the motorcar manufacturers no grudge now; they ceased to be of interest long ago."
"Lynx slept through in the stove door. I paid a lot of attention to the little tomcat."
"Worry had made me weak and a prey to disease."
"It was delightful to be well again, to breathe the pure snowy air and feel that I was still alive."
"I felt a great uneasiness about the whole matter which developed into a constant source of irritation."
"My imagination is very limited, and doesn’t penetrate the smooth, white flesh of cold-blooded creatures."
"An ant the size of a man would be a nightmare to me."
"Strangeness and badness are still one and the same thing for me."
"I see it sitting alone in its spruce tree staring over the meadow, a miserable absurdity that shouldn’t exist, a white crow."
"Because of my illness, February seemed very short."
"The sun tempted me to sit on the bench, but it made me too drowsy and I had to stop."
"I couldn’t breathe deeply, and whenever I fetched hay or chopped wood this shortness of breath was an obstacle."
"The past few weeks struck me as entirely unreal."
"The thought of what I had recently become repelled me."
"The deer found enough to eat in the forest meadow."
"I walked out in the moist gleam of the March days that had prematurely tempted the flowers from the earth."
"Who knows how long I would have gone on living like that if Lynx hadn’t intervened."
"I soon noticed that I was getting stronger and more skillful again."
"I was afraid the cat would set off on her adventures, but she showed no sign of being in love."
"The grass had survived so well under the snow that in places it had stayed green."
"I’d stopped wearing proper clothes a long time ago."
"I was already beginning to experience for myself the dismantling effect that spending a lot of time on my own, quietly, can bring about."
"The water ran down from the rocks in rapid rivulets and seeped into the road."
"The scythe hissed through the grass, and the moist swathes fell."
"I had spent my whole life on the other side of the wall copying the thoughts and actions of other people."
"I was already looking forward to the move, and summer had seemed a mere interlude."
"I couldn’t spend the whole winter sitting at the table with that one question in my head, a question that no human being, nobody at all in the world, can answer."
"I shall never learn to rub two sticks together to make a spark, or find a flint, because I’d never recognize one."
"I shall be very close to Bella and the new calf, and shall watch over them day and night."
"Memories, mourning and fear will remain, and hard work, as long as I live."