Joseph Roth > Quotes

“A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world." 96”
― Joseph Roth, Flight Without End

“I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.”
― Joseph Roth, The Emperor's Tomb

“There is a fear of voluptuousness that is itself voluptuous, just as a certain fear of death can itself be deadly.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“[O]ur relationship with nature has become warped. You see, nature has acquired a purpose where we are concerned. Its task is to amuse us. It no longer exists for its own sake.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“The good man believed that shortsighted people were also deaf and that their spectacles would become clearer if their ears heard more sharply.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Only the small things in life are important”
― Joseph Roth

“What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.”
― Joseph Roth

“In those days before the Great War when the events narrated in this book took place, it had not yet become a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When one of the living had been extinguished another did not at once take his place in order to obliterate him: there was a gap where he had been, and both close and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they became aware of his gap. When fire had eaten away a house from the row of others in a street, the burnt-out space remained long empty. Masons worked slowly and cautiously. Close neighbors and casual passers-by alike, when they saw the empty space, remembered the aspect and walls of the vanished house. That was how things were then. Everything that grew took its time in growing and everything that was destroyed took a long time to be forgotten. And everything that had once existed left its traces so that in those days people lived on memories, just as now they live by the capacity to forget quickly and completely.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Von der Humanität durch Nationalität zur Bestialität.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“I am alone. My heart beats only for myself. The strikers mean nothing to me. I have nothing in common with the mob, nor with individuals. I am a cold person. In the war I did not feel I was part of my company. We all lay in the same mud and waited for the same death. But I could think only about my own life and death. I would step over corpses and it oftened saddened me that I could feel no pain.”
― Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy

“In no time, the platoon were on their feet in front of him, formed up into two ranks, and it struck him suddenly, and probably for the first time in his military career, that these men with their drilled precision were dead parts of dead machines that didn't produce anything.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Our grandfathers didn't leave us much strength, not enough strength to live with, but just about enough to die a meaningless death. Ach!”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.”
― Joseph Roth

“Anyone called upon to view misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.”
― Joseph Roth

“Gradually too, Trotta's disappointment was replaced by a sweet melancholy. He made a pact with his sadness. Everything in the world was as sad as it could be, and at the very heart of this wretched world was the Lieutenant. It was for him that the frogs were bruiting so piteously tonight, and the pain-filled crickets were waiting on his behalf. It was for him that the spring night was filled with such a sweet and easy sadness, for him that the stars were positioned so unattainably high in the sky, and it was to him alone that their light blinked so longingly and vainly. The unending pain of the world fitted itself to Trotta's hurt.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Astonishing, really, that they still look human. They ought to look like megaphones, like screams, like brutal desires, like beery ecstasies... like decadent barism. But the unconscious drive to remain in God's image seems to be so strong that not even the six-day races can quite eradicate it.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Откакто съм възрастен, вече не плача и не се смея.”
― Joseph Roth, Легенда за светия пияница: разкази и новели

“Our living room had a clock in it that used to clear its throat before striking the hours. He is that harrumphing.”
― Joseph Roth

“There still exists - even today - a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness - or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ - had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe. Patriotism is particularism. ...
However, European culture goes back much further than the nations of Europe. Greece, Rome and Israel, Christendom and Renaissance, the French Revolution and Germany’s eighteenth century, the supranational music of Austria and Slavic poetry: these are the forces that have sculpted the face of Europe. All these forces have forged European solidarity and the European cultural consciousness. None of these forces know national boundaries. All are the enemies of that barbarian power: so-called ‘national pride’.”
― Joseph Roth, On the End of the World

“Many of us served in the war, many died. We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!”
― Joseph Roth

“Er war so einfach und untadelig wie seine Konduitenliste, und nur der Zorn, der ihn manchmal ergriff, hätte einen Kenner der Menschen ahnen lassen, daß auch in der Seele des Hauptmanns Trotta die nächtlichen Abgründe dämmerten, in denen die Stürme schlafen und die unbekannten Stimmen namenloser Ahnen.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“So they bring our poor Andreas into the vestry, and unfortunately he's no longer capable of speech, all he can do is reach for the left inside pocket of his jacket where he has the money he owes the little creditress, and he says: 'Miss Thérèse!' - and he sighs once, and he dies.
May God grant us all, all of us drinkers, such a good and easy death!”
― Joseph Roth, The Legend of The Holy Drinker

“He felt light, lighter than ever in all his years. He had severed all relationships. It occurred to him that he had been alone for years. He had been alone since that moment when desire had ceased between his woman and himself. He was alone -alone. Wife and children had surrounded him and had hindered him from bearing his pain. Like useless poultices that do not aid healing, they had lain upon his wounds and had merely covered them.”
― Joseph Roth

“God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestant's are establishing a "German church" and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European culture, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture. Thanks to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing, Germanic war god.”
― Joseph Roth

“If someone had the ability to sit at every table at once, he would hear nothing but good about himself, and yet even such contortions would pale in comparison to those of the others.”
― Joseph Roth

“Morning birdsong filled the room. For all his high opinion of birds, privileged among God's creatures, still, deep in his heart, the Emperor did not trust them, just as he did not trust artists.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Погледнах за миг нагоре и в погледа ми се съдържаше цяла тирада.
Три дни непрестанно да бях говорил, нямаше да мога да ѝ кажа толкова много неща.”
― Joseph Roth, Легенда за светия пияница: разкази и новели