The Literary Condition

Lover of literature, own writing attempts on Instagram @ingridsallowpoetry

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“Much less evil would be done on earth if evil could not be done in the name of good.”

Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

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“World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire--”

Nelly Sachs

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“The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed.” Ilse Aichinger

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"A poem is a frozen moment melted by each reader for themselves to flow into the here and now."

Hilde Domin

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"Oh! What a miserable night I passed! The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment; I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin."

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley , Frankenstein

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“Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.”

Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman

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“There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.” Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes

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“The bees sit so slothfully on the flowers, and the sunshine lies so lazily on the ground. A horrible idleness prevails. -- Idleness is the root of all vice. -- What people won't do out of boredom! They study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love, marry, and multiply out of boredom and finally die out of boredom, and -- and that's the humor in it -- they do everything with the most serious faces, without realizing why and with God knows what intentions. All these heroes, these geniuses, these idiots, these saints, these sinners, these fathers of families are basically nothing but refined idlers. -- Why must I be the one to know this? Why can't I take myself seriously and dress this poor puppet in tails and put an umbrella in its hand so that it will become very proper and very useful and very moral? That man who just left me -- I envied him, I could have beaten him out of envy. Oh, to be someone else for once! Just for a minute. -- How that man runs! If only I knew of one thing under the sun that could still make me run.”

Georg Büchner, Leonce and Lena

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“Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.”

Arthur Miller, The Crucible

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„In July, my father left to take the waters; he left me with my mother and older brother at the mercy of the summer days, white from the heat and stunning. Stupefied by the light, we leafed through that great book of the holiday, in which the pages were ablaze with splendour, their sickly sweet pulp, deep within, made from golden pears.

Bruno Schulz, August

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Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

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It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain    

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My past is everything I failed to be.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet    

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How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves    

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I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.

Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt       

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Time destroys everything we do, whatever it is.

Thomas Bernhard, Concrete    

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When you don't know what you're living for, you don't care how you live from one day to the next. You're happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you're going to live for tomorrow.

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov