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1 " When one's married for so long, always walking on four feet and alwaysbreathing double breaths and thinking every thought twice through andthe time between the main things is packed double full with minordetails - then, sometimes, naturally, one yearns like an arrow for onewhole space thin as air. And you start up in the night, terrified byyour own breathing, which had just been going along as evenly withoutyou. But you don't rise up free - or even really as far as your knees- not once. You strike a match. And there's one of you right there,wrapped in flesh. Only then is it love. "
― Robert Musil , Die Schwärmer
2 " Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - itcomes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts,because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not beingable to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in yourown any longer than you have to. "
3 " You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because youtake it for granted that nobody's been living for them, not even for asingle hour. "
4 " The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now theright-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else;and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a widesemi-circle: alone. "
5 " Augen sind Hände, die man lebenslang nicht wäscht; so behalten sie die schmutzige Gewohnheit, alles anzurühren. "
6 " Jeder Mensch kommt auf die Welt mit Kräften für die unerhörtesten Erlebnisse. Die Gesetze binden ihn nicht. Aber dann lässt ihn das Leben immer zwischen zwei Möglichkeiten wählen, und immer fühlt er: eine ist nicht darunter; immer eine, die unerfundene dritte Möglichkeit. Und man tut alles, was man will, und hat nie getan, was man gewollt hat. Schließlich wird man talentlos. "