©hrissie ❁ ’s Reviews > Concrete > Status Update

"We want to achieve everything, and we achieve nothing. And naturally we make the highest, the very highest demands of ourselves, completely leaving out of account human nature, which is after all not made to meet the highest demands. The world spirit, as it were, overestimates the human spirit. We are always bound to fail because we set our sights a few hundred per cent higher than is appropriate."

"I began to wonder whether my inability to start work, and more generally my illness and imminent death, were not perhaps due to the poisoned air from the paper factory."

"I have no relatives, I always tell her. I have only intellectual kin. The dead philosophers are my relatives."

"How shall I begin? It’s the simplest thing in the world, I told myself, and I can’t understand why this simplest thing in the world eludes me."

"I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick — impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word [...] but it is equally mistaken to say that we actually need someone. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one."