Short Fiction quotes

It almost belonged, moreover, to his official position, for he was managing director of a brand-new company. His old friend Dr. Henck, on the contrary, had no fur coat: he had instead a pretty wife and three children. Dr. Henck was thin and pale.

Some people grow fat with marriage, others grow thin.

Dr. Henck had grown thin, and remained so on this particular Christmas Eve.

but this other he could surely never kiss, because she was an ideal, a star, and what availed “the desire of the moth for the star”?

She thought that she should very much like to have him kiss her, so that she might have occasion to be downright angry with him and show how deeply she despised him.

She would get up, pull her skirts tightly round her, give him a glance brimmed with icy contempt, and go off, erect and calm, without any unnecessary haste.

But in order that he might not divine what she thought, she asked in a low, soft voice, “Do you think there is another life after this?”

He thought it would be easier to kiss her if he said yes.

But he could not remember for certain what he might have said on other occasions about the same subject, and he was afraid of contradicting himself. He therefore looked her deep in the eyes and answered, “There are times when I think so.”

It felt much more strange than she had supposed. She felt that she was growing pale and faint, she entirely forgot that she was to give him a box on the ear and that he was only a student reading for his examination.

But he thought of a passage in a book by a religious physician on The Sex Life of Woman, which read: “One must guard against letting the marital embrace come under the dominion of sensuality.” And he thought that this must be very difficult to guard against, if even a kiss could do so much.

When the moon came up, they were still sitting there and kissing.

“The younger of those girls is very pretty,” replied Martin.

“It’s dreadful to be annihilated, and it’s also dreadful not to be able to be annihilated,” remarked another of my friends.

Martin continued this line of argument.

The fact is I hope they will then collectively destroy each other and themselves. It occurs to me that our interests—otherwise so far apart—should here for once find a point of contact. What advice can you give me?”

The Devil bit the end of his tail reflectively.

“Lord,” he answered finally, “Thy wisdom is as great as Thy goodness. Statistics show that the greatest number of crimes are committed in the autumn, when the days are dismal, the sky is gray, and the earth is enveloped in rain and mist.”

Crime increased in a dizzying scale; the prisons were overcrowded, the madhouses afforded room for only the clever. The number of the living decreased, and their dwellings stood deserted. They instituted capital punishment for suicide; nothing did any good.

Mankind, who for so many generations had dreamed and poetized about an eternal spring, now went to meet their last days through an eternal autumn.

Day by day the destruction went on. Countrysides were laid waste, cities fell in ruins. Dogs gathered in the squares and howled; but in the alleys an old lame man went about from house to house with a sack on his back and collected souls.

What was I to answer?

I should have given much to be able to tell her what it meant; but I could not, for it meant precisely nothing.

Ah, well, that was many years ago. I now smoke other cigars, which I buy in another shop, and I no longer wonder about the meaning of life—but that is not because I think I have found it.

Ah, well, that was many years ago.

I now smoke other cigars, which I buy in another shop, and I no longer wonder about the meaning of life⁠—but that is not because I think I have found it.

But the other was the apothecary, and he was a quite ordinary apothecary with a white vest. He held her pressed against the white stem of the birch and kissed her.

But when he had kissed her three times, I went away and wept bitterly.

Then without looking up, in a voice which forty years of mediation between God and the world had impressed with the mild tone of tolerance and indulgence, he continued:

“Go on, my dear brother! Excuse the interruption!”

He knew of no other reason. But of course that was not the only one; they must have found something in him that irritated them. I saw it in him that he was not like the others.

The exceptional, the divergent always irritates children and mobs.

A schoolboy’s eccentricities are punished by the teacher with a well-intended monition or a dry satiric smile;

And to me she said, “What is it you go around talking about? What are you thinking about?”

Grownups have a terrible passion for asking children the most inconsiderate questions.

I ran off and hid.

I regretted it to be sure but wouldn’t ask her pardon, and soon after I let her go to the deuce.

At the same time I learned to think in silence⁠—and with a few exceptions have continued to do so.

But whence had I got Signy? In the same house with us lived a little girl, with whom I sometimes played. Her mother was in the ballet, and once she dressed herself in one of her mother’s ballet skirts.

There are two kinds of dogs: dogs that have a master, and dogs that have none. Outwardly the difference is not material; a masterless dog may be as fat as others, often fatter. No, the difference lies in another direction.

Mankind is for dogs the infinite, providence.

To obey a master, to follow him, rely upon him—that is, so to speak, the meaning of a dog’s existence. To be sure, he has not his master in his thoughts every minute of the day, nor does he always follow close at his heels.

And here they come, rushing from every direction: from the Library Fount, from Linné’s Statue, and all the way from Scheele’s Knoll, until finally they reach the statue, The Father of the Ages, where they bark in chorus, “Er‑ror—Er‑ror—Er‑ror—!”

I hear them barking still.

It celebrates the new, the fresh, the present, what we must admire so as not to be out of things—even if it seems tiresome sometimes. Toward the old, the past, it is pitiless; it calls an old ruin straight out an old ruin.—

The moon, on the other hand, the moon is a reactionary.

It reveres the dynasties of banished beauty. It makes us think of the beauty that enchanted us in our first youth, which we laugh at now or have forgotten; of voices that are silenced; of caresses under which we trembled long ago.”

“

So happiness passes from one to another.

It’s no good shutting your hands on it with a convulsive grip; no matter what you do, some day you’ll be standing with your hands full of empty air.

The boy sits quiet a moment and ponders. New thoughts and impressions about things stir in his brain and mingle with the old. He points with his little finger on the glass over the burning city and says:

“Yes, but it was burning yesterday, and now today it’s burning too.”

The father ventures on an explanation of the difference between pictures and reality. “That is not a real city,” he says, “that is only a picture. The real city was burned up long, long ago. It is gone.

The boy looks at his father with round eyes. Suddenly all the little face brightens, the boy tears himself away from his father, and begins to skip and dance again in the sunny spots on the green carpet, crying at the top of his lungs:

“Oho yes, I did just the same. I was somewhere, I was somewhere!”

He thought his father was only joking with him. Such an idea was clearly too ridiculous! The maids used sometimes to talk nonsense to him in jest, and he thought his father had done the same.

my guardian angel was watching over me. The little rowdy did not come out of his gate; he stood where he was with his hands in his pockets and, looking at me with indifference rather than hate, spoke only the following words:

“Give yourself a shove from behind, kid, and you’ll go faster!”

Thereupon he took a piece of charcoal from his pocket, scratched a monosyllabic word on the wall, and vanished in at the gate.

but I never got any satisfactory explanation of how it is that one can not push himself forward on a sled by hitting himself on the back. It sometimes happens still that I lie awake at night puzzling over the question.

And if some day I have a son and he asks me about it, I am fully resolved to laugh at him and tell him he is stupid.