The Sleepwalkers - pg. 325

And he forgave the malignant rage of men, for he saw quite well that it sprang from fear that was always at their backs, telling them they must die. A stupid and thoughtless orchestra player he might be, but he could play sonatas from memory, and, versed in all kinds of knowledge, in spite of his sadness he could smile at the fact that human beings in their thirst for the absolute yearn for eternal love, imagining that then their lives can never come to an end, but will endure for ever. They might despise him because he had to play potpourris and polkas; nevertheless he knew that these hunted creatures, seeking the imperishable and the absolute in earthly things, would always find no more than a symbol and a substiute for the thing which they sought, and whose name they did not know: for they could watch others dying without regret or sorrow, so completely were they mastered by the thought of their own death; they furiously strove for the possession of some woman that they might in turn be possessed by her, for in her they hoped to find something steadfast and unchangeable which would own and guard them, and they hated the woman whom in their blindness they had chosen, hated her because she was only a symbol which they longed to destroy in their anger when they found themselves once more delivered over to fear and death.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 307

No, that man would never run after him again, so as to strike him from behind with his crutch; no man could really run after another, nor could the other send him away, for each was condemned to go his own lonely path, a stranger to all companionship: what mattered was to free oneself from the coil of the past, so that one might not suffer. One had simply to walk fast enough. Martin's threat had had singularly little effect, as if it were a clumsy work-a-day copy of a higher reality with which one had been already familiar for a long time. And if one left Martin behind, if one so to speak sacrificed him, that too was merely a work-a-day version of a higher sacrifice; but it was necessary if the past was to be finally destroyed.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 304

Yet one must be cautious in expressing such generalizations: for the colonists easily take offence, and then they withdraw into a still more impenetrable solitude. In the prairies, however, in the grass-lands which they love, rich in hills and veined with cooling streams, they are a cheerful race, although they are too shamefast to sing. Such is the life of the colonists, remote from care, and they seek it beyond the ocean. They die lightly and still young, even should their hair be already grey, for their longing is a perpetual rehearsal of farewell. They are as proud as Moses when he beheld the promised land, he alone in his divine longing, and he alone forbidden to enter. And often one may see among them the same somewhat hopeless and somewhat contemptuous gesture of the hand as in Moses on the mount. For irrevocably behind them lies the home of their race, and inaccessibly before them stretches the distance, and the man whose longing has been transformed without his knowledge sometimes feels like one whose sufferings have been merely deadened, and who can never fully forget them. Vain hope! For who can tell whether he is pressing towards the blessed fields, or straying like a lost orphan? Even though one's grief for the irretrievable becomes less and less the farther one presses into the promised land, even if many things thin away into vapour in the deepening radiance, and one's grief too becomes lighter, more and more transparent, perhaps even invisible, yet it does not vanish any more than the longing of the man in whose sleep-wandering the world passes away, dissolving into a memory of the darkness of woman, desirous and maternal, where at last it is only a painful echo of what had once been. Vain hope, and ofter groundless arrogance. A lost generation.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 296

The desire that someone should come to pay the debt of sacrificial death and redeem the world to a new innocence: this eternal dream of mankind may rise to murder, this eternal dream may rise to clairvoyance. All knowledge wavers between the dreamt wish and the foreshadowing dream, all knowledge of the redeeming sacrifice and the kingdom of salvation.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 295

They are sitting on benches which the designers, with shameless and perhaps premature knowingness, have made to fit the twice-curved form of the seated body, they are sitting eight in a row, packed tight in a wooden cage, they roll their heads and hear the creaking of wood and the light squeak of rods above the rolling, pounding wheels. Those facing the engine despise the others who are looking back into the past; they are afraid of the draught, and when the door is thrown open they fear that someone might come in and make them look over their shoulders. For the man whose head is turned the wrong way can no longer judge between guilt and atonement, he doubts that two and two make four, doubts that he is is his own mother's child and not a changeling. So even their toes are carefully pointed forward in the direction of the business affairs that are to occupy them. For the occupations they follow bind them together in a community, -- a community that has no power but is full of uncertainty and malice.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 272

"Love is only possible in a strange country. If you want to love really, you must begin a new life and destroy everything in your old one. Only in a new, quite strange life, where everything past is so dead that you don't even need to forget it, can two human beings become so at one that the past and even time itself no longer exist for them."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 292

When desires and aims meet and merge, when dreams begin to foreshadow the great moments and crises of life, the road narrows then into darker gorges, and the prophetic dream of death enshrouds the man who has hitherto walked dreaming in sleep: all that has been, all aims, all desires, flit past him once more as they do before the eyes of a dying man, and one can well-nigh call it chance if that road does not end in death.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 272

"Love is only possible in a strange country. If yo want to love really, you must begin a new life and destroy everything in your old one. Only in a new, quite strange life, where everything past is so dead that you don't even forget it, can two human beings become so at one that the past and even time itself no longer exist for them."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 263

Esch could not but think of Frau Hentjen's silence. The band was making a great din, and Harry, leaning over the table so as not to have to shout, said mysteriously and in a low voice: "Love is a matter of distance; here are two people, and each is on a separate star, and neither can know anything of the other. And then suddenly distance is annihilated and time is annihilated, and they have flown together, so that they have no separate awareness of each other or of themselves, and feel no need of it. That is love."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 259

"Police swine," he growled. The wet asphalt shone like a photographic film, dark brown in the light of the yellow lamps, and Esch saw before him the Statue of Liberty whose torch consumed and released all the husks of one's past life, delivering into flame all that was dead and gone -- and if that was murder, it was a kind of murder beyond the jurisdiction of the police: murder in the cause of redemption.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 256

He read a portion of it every day. At first he had contented himself with the illustrations, and now when he thought of America it seemed to him that the trees there were not green, the meadows not brightly coloured, the sky no longer blue, but that all American life was deployed against a polished and elegant chiaroscuro as in the brownish grey photographs, or against the sharp contours of the delicately limned pen-drawings. Later on, however, he became absorbed in the text. The recurring statistics certainly bored him, but he was too conscientious to skip them and succeeded in learning a good deal by heart.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 255

For the man who wills Goodness and Righteousness wills thereby the Absolute, and it was revealed to Esch for the first time that the goal is not the appeasement of lust but an absolute oneness exalted far above its immediate, sordid and even trivial occasion, a conjoint trace, itself timeless and so annihilating time; and that the rebirth of man is as still and serene as the universal spirit that yet contracts and closes round man when once his ecstatic will has compelled it, until he attains his sole birthright: deliverance and redemption.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 245

When Frau Hentjen got up the dawn was just breaking. She opened the window to see how the day promised. The sky arched clear and cloudless over the dark, grey, yard, which lay below her in motionless silence, a little rectangle within dark walls. The clean washtubs from last washing day were still standing down there. A cool wind, imprisoned between the walls, smelt of the city.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 223

When an honest man emigrates to America his relations and friends stand on the quay and wave their handkerchiefs to him. The ship's band plays, Must I then, must I them, leave my native Town, and although one might regard this, in view of the frequency with which ships make the voyage, as a show of hypocrisy on the part of the bandmaster, yet many of the listeners are moved. When the rope is once made fast to the tiny tug, when the ocean giant floats out on the dark, buoyant mirror of the sea, then fitful and forlorn over the water come faint gusts of more cheerful melodies with which the kindly bandmaster is trying to enliven the departing passengers.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 210

It was altogether a good day for Fraulein Erna. Esch had asked her for something which she could refuse him, and besides she was wearing a pair of new shoes that made her feel gay and looked well on her feet.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 158

IV

Nevertheless after some eighteen months they had their first child. It actually happened. How this came about cannot be told here. Besides, after the material for character construction already provided, the reader can imagine it for himself.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 99

"Somewhere in everybody there's an insane hope that the little scrap of love that is given us will fling that bridge over the void. Be on your guard against the pathos of love."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 97

"Love is an absolute thing, Elisabeth, and when the absolute tries to express itself in earthly terms, then it always turns into pathos, simply because it can't be demonstrated. And as the whole thing then becomes so horribly earthly, the pathos is always very funny, represented by the gentleman who goes down on his knees to get you to accede to all his wishes; and if one loves you one must avoid that."

Was his intention in saying this to intimate that he loved her? As he became silent she looked at him questioningly. He appeared to understand:

"There is a true pathos, and we call it eternity. And as there is no positive eternity for human beings it must be a negative one and can be put in the words 'never-to-meet-again.' If I go away now, eternity is here; then you will be eternally remote from me and I can say that I love you."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 89

The trees beside the road rose darkly and the dust smelt cool, as it would smell probably in a cave or a cellar. But in the west a reddish strip still hung in the darkening sky over the rolling landscape.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 48

When a man follows another in the street, even if it is only mechanically and with ostensible indifference, he will soon find himself attaching all sorts of wishes, benevolent and malevolent, to the man he is following . Probably he will want at least to see the man's face and wish that he should turn round, even though since his brother's death he has thought himself invulnerable against the temptation to seek in every half-feared face the face of his mistress. In any case there is nothing to explain why the sudden thought should have come to Joachim that the erect bearing of all the people here in this street was quite unjustified, that it was compatible with their better knowledge, or due merely to an abysmal unawareness that some time all their bodies would have to stretch themselves out in death. And yet the walk of the man in front was not in the least sharp, rapid or headlong, nor was there any fear that he might fall and break one of his legs, for he was far too soft for that to happen.