Joseph Roth Quotes & Sayings

Many of us served in the war, many died. We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany! — Joseph Roth

Somebody cracks a joke, a whole row laughs, one witticism sets off another, and, like matches, they flare up and burn down. — Joseph Roth

Never yet has such furious movement brought in its train such slowness in the passage of time. Everything is spinning, only time stands still. The rotation goes on forever. And when the wheel finally stops spinning, the riders in their relief forget that they have paid money to enjoy themselves, and only had the fright of their lives. They feel glad to have gotten out alive. — Joseph Roth

Taittinger pondered, but he was well aware that no amount of pondering had yet helped him to a sensible conclusion. — Joseph Roth

Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk. — Joseph Roth

He wore a gleaming top hat. He had a pomaded, uptwirled black moustache. He looked like a first-class funeral. — Joseph Roth

The good man believed that shortsighted people were also deaf and that their spectacles would become clearer if their ears heard more sharply. — Joseph Roth

Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world. 96 — Joseph Roth

I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will. — Joseph Roth

Domestic interior design is a fraught affair. It makes me hanker for the mild and soothing and tasteless red velvet interiors in which people lived so undiscriminatingly no more than twenty years ago. It was unhygienic, dark, cool, probably stuffed full of dangerous bacteria, and pleasant. — Joseph Roth

His round cheeks are of a red that seems to glow from within, as if he had a lit candle in his mouth like a paper lantern at a summer fete. — Joseph Roth

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically. — Joseph Roth

Misery crouches beside me, ever larger and ever gentler; pain takes an interest, becomes huge and kind; terror flutters up, and it doesn't even frighten me anymore. And that'a the most desolate thing of all. — Joseph Roth

Dazzled by the luminosity of logic, she leans back, closing her eyes. She loses herself, she is lost. — Joseph Roth

Morning birdsong filled the room. For all his high opinion of birds, privileged among God's creatures, still, deep in his heart, the Emperor did not trust them, just as he did not trust artists. — Joseph Roth

It is the - actually profoundly unartistic - impulse to produce exterior likeness rather than inner truth: the same impulse as naturalistic photograpy and the copy. — Joseph Roth

Therefore, the very large department store should not be viewed as a sinful undertaking, as, for example, the Tower of Babel. It is, rather, proof of the inability of the human race of today to be extravagant. It even builds skyscrapers: and the consequence this time isn't a great flood, but just a shop ... — Joseph Roth

From time to time I think of describing the "German", or defining his "typical" existence. Probably that isn't possible. Even when I sense the presence of such a thing, I am unable to define it. What can I do, apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit? The describing of singularities within this profusion may be the least deceptive; the chance thing, plucked from a tangle of others, may most easily make for order. I have seen this and that; I have tried to write about what stuck in my senses and my memory. — Joseph Roth

The windows in the soup kitchen are never opened, and for that reason the aroma of old meals lingers in corners and rises from the table tops - which are never washed - when the steam from the freshly cooked food brings them back to life. — Joseph Roth

They talk about prohibition in America. What can one do in a country such as that?
'What does one do in America when one is sad - without alcohol?' asks Zwonimir. — Joseph Roth

The calendrical harshness of nature is nothing to the boundless cruelty of history. — Joseph Roth

God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestant's are establishing a "German church" and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European culture, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture. Thanks to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing, Germanic war god. — Joseph Roth

Only on Sundays do you come across political scout troops with sandals, walking sticks, and knives. In the woods they do round dances, they rave about nature, and have big brawls with each other. It's a strange, baffling young generation. It covet's the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, but not his shy piety and love of nature. — Joseph Roth

The world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power. The earth has lived through several evolutionary stages - but following always natural laws. It is presently experiencing a new one, which follows constructive, conscious, and no less elemental laws. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat. — Joseph Roth

An indescribable sadness emanated from the white splendour of the staircase and balustrade; the blood-red, now almost black splendour of the carpets. The huge palms in their huge pots looked like they had recently arrived from the cemetery. Their dark green leaves also looked blackish, like wizened, perished weapons from olden days. — Joseph Roth

I think it's our unique product selection and the idea that everything we sell only can be purchased at Ikea. — Joseph Roth

Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite. — Joseph Roth

Astonishing, really, that they still look human. They ought to look like megaphones, like screams, like brutal desires, like beery ecstasies ... like decadent barism. But the unconscious drive to remain in God's image seems to be so strong that not even the six-day races can quite eradicate it. — Joseph Roth

Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them. — Joseph Roth

A puff of wind blew out their skirts, and they looked like two wandering flags. — Joseph Roth

I might be capable of making figures that have heart, conscience, passion, emotion and decency. But there's no call for that at all in the world. People are only interested in monsters and freaks, so I give them their monsters. Monsters are what they want! — Joseph Roth

It's as though the inhabitants of the cities were outdistanced by the wisdom and the aspirations of the cities themselves. Things have a better feeling for the future than people do. People feel historically, i.e. retrospectively. Walls, streets, wires, chimneys feel prospectively. People get in the way of progress. They hang sentimental weights on the winged feet of time. — Joseph Roth

The woman who had escaped with her life now wept for the loss of her umbrella and was not at all grateful that her limbs were intact. — Joseph Roth

But the policeman radiates the calm and ease of a traffic light; — Joseph Roth

I am not a man of my time. In fact I find it hard not to declare myself its enemy. Not, as I often remark, that I fail to understand it. My comment is merely a pious one. Because I am easy-going I prefer not to be aggressive or hostile and therefore I say that I do not understand those matters which I ought to say I hate or despise. I have sharp hears but I pretend to be hard of hearing, finding as I do that is more elegant to feign this handicap than to admit that I have heard some vulgar sound — Joseph Roth

But our tram needs its overhead wires, and the wires need long, bare, wooden poles, with a couple of china pots flowering at the top end, for purposes of electricity. A caricature of a snowdrop. — Joseph Roth

I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish. — Joseph Roth

A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus. — Joseph Roth

A skyscraper is the incarnate rebellion against the supposedly unattainable; against the mystery of altitude, against the otherworldliness of the cerulean. — Joseph Roth

[O]ur relationship with nature has become warped. You see, nature has acquired a purpose where we are concerned. Its task is to amuse us. It no longer exists for its own sake. — Joseph Roth

I am alone. My heart beats only for myself. The strikers mean nothing to me. I have nothing in common with the mob, nor with individuals. I am a cold person. In the war I did not feel I was part of my company. We all lay in the same mud and waited for the same death. But I could think only about my own life and death. I would step over corpses and it oftened saddened me that I could feel no pain. — Joseph Roth

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about. — Joseph Roth

Perhaps one can see one's destiny accomplished before one's very eyes and still feel hungry. — Joseph Roth

And in the evening concealed fluorescent tubes light the room so evenly that it is no longer illuminated, it is a pool of luminosity. — Joseph Roth

Lieutenant Trotta wasn't experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written. — Joseph Roth

The escalator seems to me to typify this: It leads us up, by climbing on our behalf. Yes, it doesn't even climb, it flies. Each step carries its shopper aloft, as though afraid he might change his mind. It takes us up to merchandise we might not have bothered to climb an ordinary flight of steps for. — Joseph Roth

Our living room had a clock in it that used to clear its throat before striking the hours. He is that harrumphing. — Joseph Roth

When I leave the hotel the porter stands beside the revolving door, primed to greet me, like a talking fork. — Joseph Roth

On Sundays the world is as bright and empty as a balloon. — Joseph Roth

But they bear the burden of being unpopular as proof of their importance - and these eminences turn the suspicion that less elevated customers are careful to disguise as courtesy into naked contempt and disdain. All the people one doesn't need right now are - for the person who will need them in a year's time - no more than air which he breathes but doesn't need to see. — Joseph Roth

The conductor was eating a young ladies' cinema nibble with a rigid, humourless expression, as though it was the doorstop or hunk of sausage that would have accorded with his personality. — Joseph Roth

But the sound of despair is never pleasant; it sounds suspiciously like lying. — Joseph Roth

Only the small things in life are important — Joseph Roth

Anyone called upon to view misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love. — Joseph Roth

Actors, who relate their woes in many clever sentences and with much waving of hands and rolling of eyes - they should be made to ride in the cars for passengers with heavy loads, to learn that a slightly bent hand can hold in it the misery of all time, and that the quiver of an eyelid can be more moving than a whole evening full of crocodile tears. — Joseph Roth

If someone had the ability to sit at every table at once, he would hear nothing but good about himself, and yet even such contortions would pale in comparison to those of the others. — Joseph Roth

Of course, it's the things you're not told that arouse your interest. The gaps in the news are the interesting bits. — Joseph Roth

There is a fear of voluptuousness that is itself voluptuous, just as a certain fear of death can itself be deadly. — Joseph Roth

What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality. — Joseph Roth

He took the Captain as he was, and was fond of him, with his cheery heartlessness, his incapacity to think beyond a couple of thoughts, for which his skull was far too roomy, his insignificant love affairs and childish infatuations, and the pointless and unconnected remarks that came out of his mouth, seemingly at random. He was a mediocre officer, who didn't care about his comrades, his men, his career. — Joseph Roth

Of course the merchandise appears to be cheaper. Because where there are so many things close together, they can hardly help not thinking of themselves as precious. In their own eyes they shrink, and they lower their prices, and they become humble, for humility in good expresses itself as cheapness. And since there are also so many shoppers crowded together, the goods make less of a challenge or an appeal to them; and so they too become humble. If the very large department store looked to begin with like a work of hubris, it comes to seem merely an enormous container for human smalless and modesty; an enormous confession of earthly cheapness. — Joseph Roth

That is originally why the concept evolved to include accessories. We found that furniture sells better when you show it with accessories. — Joseph Roth

I am thankful once again to strip off an old life, as I so often have during these years. I look back upon a soldier, a murderer, a man almost murdered, a man resurrected, a prisoner, a wanderer. — Joseph Roth

The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death. They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them. — Joseph Roth

Above all there's a lack of personal discipline, manners, decorum, natural discretion. If everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don't see it that way, not even in a moment of danger. As they see it they are bound always to be the other's enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things. Sending experts into other countries won't help much, so long as each individual refuses to work out his own personal traffic plan. There is a wisdom in the accident of language by which there is a single word, "traffic," for movement in the streets, and for people's dealings with one another. — Joseph Roth

She wasn't the first, nor the last. These are the women he crosses paths with. He doesn't become her destiny, nor she his. They are his episodes, and luckily he too is just an episode. He wanders along on the fringes of danger, and nibbles at them. — Joseph Roth