The Wall
I’d forgotten how terrible it is to be dependent on an unsatisfied body.
Marlen Haushofer • The Wall
There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind’s only chance has vanished forever. I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the
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I gradually started to break free of my past and find a new way of organizing things.
Marlen Haushofer • The Wall
On the long walk back I thought about my former life and found it unsatisfactory in all respects. I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want.
Marlen Haushofer • The Wall
Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theater and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in
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Before, I was always on my way somewhere, always in a great rush and furiously impatient; every time I got anywhere I would have to spend ages waiting. I might just as well have crept along. Sometimes I became quite clearly aware of my predicament, and of the demands of that world, but I wasn’t capable of breaking out of the stupid way of life.
Marlen Haushofer • The Wall
Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theater and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in
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It’s only when knowledge about something slowly spreads to the whole body that you truly know.
Marlen Haushofer • The Wall
She was, like all mothers, filled with awareness of having created something unique. And that was how it was, because not even two young cats are as alike as peas in a pod: not outwardly, and certainly not in their independent little souls.