Status Updates From Addio a Berlino

"Sometimes he will bend forward to the window and regard a building or a square with a mournful fixity, as if to impress its image upon his memory and to bid it goodbye."

"But the Nazi only grinned. “Now, now, comrade! No political squabbling! Remember, we’re living in the Third Reich! We’re all brothers! You must try and drive that silly political hatred from your heart!”

"Men understand each other much better when they’re alone together."

"Martin sat silent: he was thin and dark and hatchet-faced with the sardonically superior smile of the conscious conspirator."

"You can feel them all round you, tonight, creeping in upon the city, like an immense waste of unhomely ocean — sprinkled with leafless copses and ice-lakes and tiny villages which are remembered only as the outlandish names of battlefields in half-forgotten wars. Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching."

"Tonight, first time this winter, it is very cold. The dead cold grips the town in utter silence, like the silence of intense midday summer heat. In the cold the town seems actually to contract, to dwindle to a small black dot, scarcely larger than hundreds of other dots, isolated and hard to find, on the enormous European map."

"A girl laughed suddenly, shrilly, from the middle of a group of young men. Over there, in the city, the votes were being counted. I thought of Natalia: she has escaped — none too soon, perhaps. However often the decision may be delayed, all these people are ultimately doomed. This evening is the dress rehearsal of a disaster. It is like the last night of an epoch."

"Smiling sourly, adopting instinctively the armour of sulky eccentricity which protects me on such occasions, I advanced hobbling into their midst."

"Perhaps, after all, there is one drop of pure Prussian blood in my polluted
veins. Perhaps this little finger,” he held it up to the light, “is the finger of a Prussian drill-sergeant . . . You, Christopher, with your centuries of Anglo- Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.”

"She seemed a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores."

"The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. No."