The Dandelion Quotes

“Do you know what it's like to be left to yourself, when you're left alone with you, given up to yourself? I can't say it's necessarily so terrible, but it's one of the most fantastic adventures that one can have in this world: To meet one's self. To meet like this in Cell 432: naked, helpless, concentrated on nothing but one's self, without attribute or diversion and without the power to act. That's the most degrading thing: to be quite without the power to act. To have no bottle to drink from or smash, no towel to hang up, no knife to break out or cut veins with, no pen for writing-to have nothing-other than one's self.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“Then you are lost. For the darkness has a terrible voice. You cannot escape it and in a flash it has overwhelmed you. It assails you with memory-of the murder you committed yesterday. And it attacks you with the foreknowledge-of the murder you'll commit tomorrow. And it presses up a cry in you: unheard fish-cry of the solitary animal, overwhelmed by its own sea. And the cry tears up your face and makes hollows in it full of fear and past danger, that terrify others. So silent is the dreadful darkness-cry of the solitary animal in its own sea.

And it mounts like a flood and rushes on, dark-winged, threatening, like breakers. And hisses wickedly, like foam.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“Railways, by days and by night. The flowers in the cuttings with their sooty blossoms, the birds on the wires with their sooty voices, they are their friends and long remember them.

And we also stand still, with astonished eyes, when-already from the far distant distance- there's the cry of promise. And we stand, with hair streaming, when it's there like thunder and as though it had rolled round heaven knows what worlds. And we're still standing, with sooty cheeks, when-already from the far distant distance-it cries. Cries, far, far away. Cries.

Really it was nothing. Or everything. Like us.

And they beat, beyond the windows of prisons, sweet dangerous, promising rhythms. You are all ears then, poor prisoner, all hearing, for the clattering, oncoming trains in the night and their cry and their whistle shiver the soft dark of your cell with pain and desire.

Or they crash bellowing over the bed, when at night you're harboring fever. And your veins, the moon-blue, vibrate and take up the song, the song of the freight trains: Under way-under way-under way- And your ear's an abyss, that swallows the world.

Under way. But ever and again you are spat out at stations, abandoned to farewell and departure.

And the stations raise up their pale signboards like brows beside your dark road. And they have names, those furrowed-brown signs, names, which are the world: bed, they mean, hunger and women. Ulla or Carola. And frozen feet and tears. And they mean tobacco, the stations, or lipstick or schnapps. Or God or bread. And the pale brows of the stations, the signboards, have names, that mean: women.

You are yourself a railway track, rusty, stained, silver, shiny, beautiful and uncertain. And you are divided into sections and bound between stations. And they have signboards whereon is written women, or murder, or moon. And then that is the world.

You are a railway- rumbled over, cried over- you are the track- on you everything happens and makes you rust blind and silver bright.

You are human, your brain giraffe-lonely somewhere above on your endless neck. And no one quite knows your heart.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“Why? Why I live? Out of spite perhaps! Out of pure spite. It's spite that makes me laugh and eat and sleep and wake up again. Just spite.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“And now I've been left alone with that Being, no, not just left alone, I've been locked in together with the Being I fear most of all: my self.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“What? What will happen? What's supposed to happen? Who? Where? Nothing's ever happened yet, man, not yet!

And the other answers:

No, nothing's happened. Nothing. We still gnaw bones, still live in caves of wood and stone. Nothing's happened. Nothing's come. I know. But: cant it come any day? This evening? The day after tomorrow? It can even be round the next corner. In the next bed. On the other side. For some time it must come, the unexpected, the foreseen, the great, the new. The adventure, the mystery, the solution. At last perhaps there'll come the answer. And that, I should miss that? No, man, no never! Never and never! Don't you feel that something can happen? Don't ask what! Don't you feel that, eh? Don't you suspect it, inside and outside you? For it's coming, man, perhaps it's there already. Somewhere. Unrecognized. Secret. Perhaps we shall understand it tonight, tomorrow at noon, next week, on the death-bed. Or are we senseless? Abandoned to the laughter in us and round us? To sorrow, to tears and to the bellowing of night and terror? Abandoned? Perhaps? Perhaps surrendered? Perhaps lost? Is there no answer? Are we, we ourselves, that answer? Or not, man, answer. Tell me. Are we, in the last analysis, ourselves that answer. Do we have it in us, like death? From the very start? Do we carry death and the answer in us, you? It is up to us, whether there'll be an answer or not? Are we, after all, abandoned only to ourselves? Only to ourselves? Tell me, man: Are we ourselves the answer? Are we ourselves abandoned to ourselves? Are we? Tell me!”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“Why in the name of all that's holy don't you hang yourself, you hopeless, insane, withered, glowing lath you! You rat! Surly, snotty-nosed rat! You worm, you, milling everything into dust! You moaning, tickling, death-watch beetle! You should be plunged into petrol, you stinking rag. Hang yourself, you dithering, drunken bundle of humanity. Why aren't you hanging yet, you lost, forsaken, abandoned piece of life, eh?

His voice is filled with concern, and kind and warm in all his curses.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“And love, blood-coloured love's in the nights. And it hurts, sometimes. And it lies, always, love: but we love with everything we have.

And horror, fear, despair, no escape, are in these night full of pain-at our gin-wet tables, by out burgeoning beds, beside out song-sodden streets. But we laugh. We live with all that we can. And with all that we are.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“We believe in life, we: in the middle of death. That's how we are, we, with no illusions, we with the grand impossible ideas.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“And we, bipeds, people, human animals, with our bit of red sap, with our bit of warmth and bone and flesh and muscle- we bear it. Our decay is decided, incorruptibly, yet: we plant. Our downfall proclaims itself irrevocably, yet: we build. Our disappearance, our dissolution, our not-being is certain, noted down, ineffaceably- our not-being-here-any-more is directly at hand, yet: we are. We still are. We have the incomprehensible courage: to be.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“So I slowly grew used to myself. One imposes oneself so lightly on others and yet can scarcely endure one's own company. Gradually, however, I found me quite pleasant and amusing- day and night I made the oddest discoveries about me.

But in that long time I lost contact with everything, with life, with the world. The days dropped away from me rapidly and regularly. I felt how I was slowly emptied of the real world and filled with my own self. I felt how I went ever further away from this world, the world I had only just entered.

The walls were so cold and dead that I fell sick with despair and hopelessness. You scream out your misery for a few days- but when there's no answer you soon get tired. You beat for a few hours on door and wall- but when they don't open, fists are soon sore, and in this desert that tiny pain is the only pleasure.”
― Borchert Wolfgang

“And we laugh. Stand there and laugh. And our life, our love, and our precious, personal pain- they're as uncertain and accidental as the wind and the wave. Arbitrary.”
― Borchert Wolfgang