Robert Seethaler Quotes & Sayings

It's a messy business, dying,' he said. 'As time goes on there's just less and less of you. It happens quickly for some; for others it can drag on. Starting from birth you keep losing one thing after another: first a finger, than an arm, first a tooth, then a whole set of teeth, first one memory, then all your memory, and so on and so forth, until one day there's nothing left. Then they chuck what's left of you in a hole and shovel it in and that's your lot. — Robert Seethaler

He had already been so long in the world: he had seen it change and seem to spin faster with every passing year, and he felt like a remnant from some long-buried time, a thorny weed still stretching up, for as long as it possibly could, towards the sun. — Robert Seethaler

Death belonged to life like mould to bread. — Robert Seethaler

Or do you think perhaps the mountain has a memory? — Robert Seethaler

People were evidently looking for something in the mountains that they believed they had lost a long time ago. He never worked out what exactly this was, but over the years he became more and more that the tourists were stumbling not so much after him but after some obscure, insatiable longing. — Robert Seethaler

You can buy a man's hours off him, you can steal his days from him, or you can rob him of his whole life, but no one can take away from any man so much as a single moment. That's the way it is. — Robert Seethaler

In his life he too, like all people, had harboured ideas and dreams. Some he had fulfilled for himself; some had been granted to him. Many things had remained out of reach, or barely had he reached them than they were torn from his hands again. But he was still here. And in the mornings after the first snowmelt, when he walked across the dew-soaked meadow outside his hut and lay down on one of the flat rocks scattered there, the cool stone at his back and the first warm rays of sun on his face, he felt that many things had not gone so badly after all. — Robert Seethaler

Life and the work on the mountain had left their mark. Everything about him was warped and crooked. His back seemed to be heading down towards the earth in a tight curve, and he increasingly had the feeling that his spine was growing up over his head. On the mountain his foothold was still firm, and not even the strong autumn downwinds could make him lose his balance, but he stood like a tree that was already rotten inside — Robert Seethaler

He couldn't remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn't know where he would go. But he could look back without regret on the time in between, his life, with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement. — Robert Seethaler

Scars are like years, he said: one follows another and it's all of them together that make a person who they are. — Robert Seethaler