Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse

… My regret was for the present day, for all the countless hours and days I lost in mere passivity and that brought me nothing, not even the shocks of the awakening. But, thank God, there were exceptions. There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that brought down the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world.

… In the beginning his dream is his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

… This Steppenwolf of ours has always been aware of at least the Faustian nature of the two-fold nature within him. He had discovered that the one-fold of the body is not inhabited by a one-fold of the soul, and that at best he is only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony, He would either like to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to renounce man-kind and at last live life wholly a wolf’s life. It may be presumed that he has never carefully watched a wolf. Had he ever done so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. With them, too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being of manifold states and strivings. The world too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers.

…the same forgetfulness of a man who sings: “If I could be a child once more!” He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering.

… Whereupon it occurred to me – so it is with everyone. Just as I dress and go out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere compliments with him, without really wanting to do at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognising the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all.

… We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time.