So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At about that time I was once sitting at my place and whispering--it was naughty, I know--with my neighbor. Then you, Herr Profess...or Rudner, got up from your desk, came calmly down the aisle to me: "Did you speak?" and slapped me smack in the face. And I--the fury is inside me to this day--I didn't hit back. Such were the methods of objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You had to have seen the corpses lying there in front of the school--the men with their caps covering their faces--to know the mea...ning of class hatred and the spirit of revenge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One encounters very capable fathers abashed by their piano-playing daughters. Three measures of Schumann make them red with embarr...assment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the course of writing one historical book or another, it has happened that I could hardly restrain myself from simply copying e...ntire documents. Indeed, I sometimes sank down among the documents and said to myself, I can't improve on these.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The subject of the novel is reality liberated from soul. The reader in complete independence presented with a structured process: ...let him evaluate it, not the author. The façade of the novel cannot be other than stone or steel, flashing electrically or dark, but silent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The author's hegemony must be broken. It is impossible to go too far in fanatical self-denial or fanatical self-renunciation: I am... not I, but rather the street, the streetlights, this or that occurrence, nothing more. That's what I call the style of stone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »