Andreea Toader

“it evokes so powerfully what we all must have felt as children—the conviction that things are better elsewhere if only we could get there. The powerlessness of the child is what makes that so poignant: children are trapped in the world created for them by adults, and for most children the possibility of escape is remote. The same idea is present in the Freud poem, where he talks about the child … unlucky in his little State, some hearth where freedom is excluded, a hive whose honey is fear and worry … The sympathetic effect of these lines is immediately apparent. Yes, we all knew people like that when we were ourselves children.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

“Dr. Krokowski answered his own question, and said: “In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Let’s go back to the lines at the end of “In Praise of Limestone”: “What I hear is the sound of underground streams / What I see is a limestone landscape.” Close your eyes and try to imagine the shape of these lines. I see a falling, a descent, a softening, with the gentlest of landings at the end. And I feel resolution, calmness, and forgiveness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

“It was young Schneermann, Anton Schneermann, who sat at Mademoiselle Kleefeld’s table. You see, his place is empty. It will soon be filled up again, I am not worried about that—but Anton is off, on the wings of the wind, in the twinkling of an eye, rapt away before he knew where he was. Sixteen years old, and had been up here a year and a half, with six months to go. But how did it happen? Who knows? Perhaps somebody dropped a little word to Madame his mother; anyhow, she got wind of his goings-on, in Baccho et ceteris. She appears unannounced on the scene, some three heads taller than I am, white-haired and exceeding wroth; fetches Herr Anton a couple of boxes on the ear, takes him by the collar, and puts him on the train. ‘If he is going to the dogs,’ she says, ‘he can do it just as well down below.’ And off they go.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain