You must surely all be worried sick not to have had word from me in such a long, long time. (Location 418)
‘What lake – what mirror! Can one gaze at this girl without having heavenly songs and notes come streaming from her eyes, music that reaches deep into our innermost selves, awakening and bestirring all our dormant passions?’ (Location 677)
His sensations and desires of the night before now seemed dissolute and sacrilegious to him; he felt a childlike, humble and burning need to be in contact with people again, brother to brother, and to disassociate himself from all his godless feelings and intentions. (Location 1154)
indeed, there are many friends who can’t stand each other. (Location 4052)
viewing man as a physiological or economic machine – which, in fact, he may very well be, though this wasn’t the point as far as they were concerned – since the appeal of such a philosophy lies not in its inherent truth, but rather in its demonic, pessimistic, morbidly intellectual character. (Location 4069)
The dining rooms are likewise piled up floor on floor, as are the white-tiled baths and the balconies with their red awnings. Love, sleep, birth, digestion, unexpected reunions, troubled and restful nights are all vertically aligned in these buildings like the columns of sandwiches at a vending machine. In middle-class apartments like these your destiny is already waiting for you the moment you move in. You will admit that human freedom consists essentially of where and when we do what we do, for what we do is almost always the same – thus the sinister implications of one uniform blueprint for all. (Location 4089)
I expected nothing more now but sleep, and that the next morning would bring a day like the one that had just passed. (Location 4113)
it is as if you’d spent your childhood in an enchanted kingdom. And I immediately decided: I’ll follow the nightingale. Farewell, my beloved, I thought – farewell, my beloved, my house, my city! (Location 4126)
Note: pastoral dartmoor
You’re a stranger to me now, and I’ve arrived at the other end of love. Had I grown tired of her? I can’t remember ever having felt sated. Let me put it like this: it was as if a feeling could drill its way through the heart as though through a mountain, and find another world on the other side, a world with the same valley, the same houses and the same little bridge. (Location 4138)
Note: another world that is the same but without love
Every day claims its victims, a regular weekly average of so and so many out of a hundred, and already the divisional general staff officers are predicting the results as impersonally as an insurance company. You do it too, by the way. Instinctively you know the odds and feel insured, although not exactly under the best of terms. It is a function of the curious calm that you feel, living under constant crossfire. (Location 4172)
Note: statistic
And so your fear of death has diminished, though you are far more susceptible to all sorts of strange upsets. (Location 4177)
Note: the death fear in the subconscious (tho the following bit seems to suggest these are the fancies unencumbered by or behind the egoistic fear of death)
I am neither particularly sentimental, nor do I live for the moment; (Location 4230)
Note: musil! but that is what makes the experience profound .
She was not bright, by our way of thinking; she could disregard nothing and come to no major conclusions about life; nor was she, when I think back to my childhood, what you’d call a good person: she was vehement and always on edge. (Location 4238)
