Die Verwirrungen Des Zöglings Törleß

“The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude.””

— Robert Musil

“His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.””

— Robert Musil

“We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.””

— Robert Musil

“Es gibt immer einen Punkt dabei, wo man nicht mehr weiß, ob man lügt oder ob das, was man erfunden hat, wahrer ist als man selber.””

— Robert Musil

“There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart.””

— Robert Musil

“What's the bee in your bonnet? Seems to be some kind of idealism.””

— Robert Musil

“She liked to convey that she was well acquainted with the smartness and the manners of the stylish world, but that she had got beyond all that sort of thing. She was fond of declaring that she did not care a snap of the fingers for that, or for herself, or indeed for anything whatsoever. On this account, and in spite of her blowsiness, she enjoyed a certain degree of respect among the peasant lads of the neighbourhood. True, they spat when they spoke of her, and felt obliged to treat her with even more coarseness than other girls, but at bottom they were really mightily proud of this ‘damned slut’ who had issued from their own midst and who had so thoroughly seen through the veneer of the world.””

— Robert Musil

“And Törless could not think but that the problems of philosophy had been solved once and for all by Kant, rendering that a pointless pursuit, just as he also thought it was not worth writing poetry after Goethe and Schiller.””

— Robert Musil

“He felt himself, in a way, torn between two worlds: a solid, bourgeois world where ultimately everything was ordered and rational, as he was accustomed to from home, and an untrammelled one full of darkness, blood, and undreamt-of surprises.””

— Robert Musil