Excerpt 15 : Der Steppenwolf

August 13, 2015

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From this book, I wrote down these texts in my little book.
These excerpts came from the Harry Heller also known as the Steppenwolf's records | 1927  :
How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.  | pg 43
His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between 2 poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousand. | pg 66 
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made of many threads. | pg 69 
"If I could be a child once more!". He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering. | pg 73 
All births mean separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All. | pg 73 
It is true that every time my life was shattered in this way I had in the end gained something, some increase in liberty and in spiritual growth and depth, but with it went an increased loneliness, an increasing chill of severance and estrangement. | pg 78 
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There are something about the language written in the old days that shower me smiles. The thought of having the long gone authors scrutinize about each line to be beautiful and worth spoken out loud over and over again like a poem. I always wonder whether they actually talk like that in those days, or their architecture of writing is just both as complex and simple as it is. 

I'm 2/3 part through, there will be more beautiful excerpts to be updated I hope.
These are all my favorites, but the ✮ excerpts are my favorite-favorite :D


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