Werther Love Quotes & Sayings

In the letters he sends to his friend, Werther recounts both the events of his life and the effects of his passion; but it is literature which governs the mixture. For if I keep a journal, we may doubt that this journal relates, strictly speaking, to events. The events of amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude: "I ran into X, who was with Y" "Today X didn't call me" "X was in a bad mood," etc.: who would see a story in that? The infinitesimal event exists only in its huge reverberation: Journal of my reverberations (of my wounds, my joys, my interpretations, my rationalizations, my impulses): who would understand anything in that? Only the Other could write my love story, my novel. — Roland Barthes

Yesterday, when I took leave she seized me by the hand, and
said, "Adieu, dear Werther." Dear Werther! It was the first
time she ever called me dear: the sound sunk deep into my
heart. I have repeated it a hundred times; and last night, on
going to bed, and talking to myself of various things, I suddenly
said, "Good night, dear Werther!" and then could not
but laugh at myself. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I'd love to do 'Werther.' It's a great opera, and the music's so beautiful. — Stephen Costello

ONE HUNDRED TIMES have I been on the point of embracing
her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness
passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold
of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts.
Do not children touch everything they see? — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Werther had a love for Charlotte Such as words could never utter; Would you know how first he met her? She was cutting bread and butter. — William Makepeace Thackeray

I turned my face away. She should not act thus. She ought
not to excite my imagination with such displays of heavenly
innocence and happiness, nor awaken my heart from its slumbers,
in which it dreams of the worthlessness of life! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done so, suffering, killing themselves, dressing, perfuming themselves, writing as if they were Werther (songs, poems, candy boxes, belt buckles, fans, colognes a' la Werther). A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world. In the theory of literature, "projection" (of the reader into the character) no longer has any currency: yet it is the appropriate tonality of imaginative readings: reading a love story, it is scarcely adequate to say I project myself; I cling to the image of the lover, shut up with his image in the very enclosure of the book (everyone knows that such stories are read in a state of secession, of retirement, of voluptuous absence: in the toilet). — Roland Barthes