Annemarie Schwarzenbach Quotes

One sometimes clings tightly to pain, to bitter home-sickness and bitter regret, but one forgets one's guilt; in vain, you might think back to the beginning (who led me this far?). If only you were allowed to accuse once more, turn to others once more, love once more! You plunge into the wide, ocean-like hallucination, you have faith and pray, and forget your dark fear when you gaze into the face of your beloved. But how should one fight it?

This book will bring little joy to the reader.

Perhaps my sense of reality is not very highly developed, perhaps I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I can't always tell memories from dreams, and often I mistake dreams, coming to life again in colours, smells, sudden associations, with the eerie secret certainty of a past life from which time and space divide me no differently and no better than a light sleep in the early hours.

If you wish to know the state of a people, turn to its youth: here, nothing is disfigured yet, they express themselves in ways unset by convention, undulled by habit, unswayed by external dependencies and existential conditions; here, ability and zest for life maintains itself with lovely unselfconsciousness.

Fear? Back then, I didn't even realize what that new feeling was. Later, when it overwhelmed me and almost pulled me under, I understood. And, since then, a nameless fear has hung like a plume of smoke over the great, colourful desert of this country, above my sometimes blissful, sometimes terrible memories of it.

What does it help me now to think back on the reeling despair that seized me and declare it a mistake! Should I have set out in high spirits with a spring in my step? I did not. Should I have had more faith in the earth's friendly forces and felt certain and invulnerable at the wounding sight of flame-hued horizons? I could not do it, I was terribly vulnerable. Should I have justified myself, raising my eyes to the mountains? Oh, I tried, and always in vain...
And so one day I wanted to break away, not knowing exactly from which fate, seeming to grasp only that I had been struck by calamity, as anyone can be, and now must stand apart, silent. How do the others live, I asked myself, how do they bear this land and the day to come, how do they bear it? But should the dusk of rapture fall once more, this shadowless day ebb, the deer stand on the sloping winter meadow already cloaked in fog; should I be granted one more such innocent hour, I will lower my eyes and repent, and never again lead myself into temptation, but admit: we are at home in but a narrow precinct, can cover but a tiny distance - and beyond, at an immeasurable distance, the ships land on the death's shores.

It seemed just as clear to me that I would never pick up a pen again, fill a page with writing. The profession seemed too onerous, a perpetual mirror of our unredeemed existence, which I was also so loath to accept and endure. Over and over again to meet the morning hour anew, the day, the ever-estranged world, to touch them and wring one word from your stricken heart - and know this: this will not last, this is the moment of parting, already forgotten. But, still exhausted and blinded by pain, you must set off again, and who will make it worth your while? Is it worth the effort?