Quotes from Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Fear? Back then, I didn't even realize what that new feeling was. Later, when it overwhelmed me and almost pulled me under, I understood. And, since then, a nameless fear has hung like a plume of smoke over the great, colourful desert of this country, above my sometimes blissful, sometimes terrible memories of it.

In the end, one can only die for Sibylle. To love for her, my friends say, is degrading.

One sometimes clings tightly to pain, to bitter home-sickness and bitter regret, but one forgets one's guilt; in vain, you might think back to the beginning (who led me this far?). If only you were allowed to accuse once more, turn to others once more, love once more! You plunge into the wide, ocean-like hallucination, you have faith and pray, and forget your dark fear when you gaze into the face of your beloved. But how should one fight it?

But should it matter what we do as long as we use our strength courageously and lead a life without desperation to the end? Isn't it wrong to escape, make a detour and be lost, all of which have led me here to the farthest-flung edge of the world? Wouldn't I have had a good courageous life if only I had been able to resist sickness and fear? Will I be made to face the consequences just because I had nothing to counter a nameless and agonizing desperation?

Fürchterliche Ungewissheit? Fürchterlich nur so lange, als wir ihr nicht ins Auge zu blicken vermögen.

Perhaps my sense of reality is not very highly developed, perhaps I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I can't always tell memories from dreams, and often I mistake dreams, coming to life again in colours, smells, sudden associations, with the eerie secret certainty of a past life from which time and space divide me no differently and no better than a light sleep in the early hours.

If you wish to know the state of a people, turn to its youth: here, nothing is disfigured yet, they express themselves in ways unset by convention, undulled by habit, unswayed by external dependencies and existential conditions; here, ability and zest for life maintains itself with lovely unselfconsciousness.

Ich weiß nicht, wie ich ein Gestern ertragen habe, und ein Vorgestern, und die vielen Tage, die sich noch rückwärts reihen.

This book will bring little joy to the reader.

Sometimes I wonder why I write down all these memories. Would I want to give them to strangers to read?

Pero, ¿podía haber algo que infundiera más miedo que otra noches de espera, otro día de tensión, el no-suceder, el no-actuar?¿Acaso no se había alcanzado un punto culminante, por encima del cual solo estaba el vacío?

Es wäre natürlich ganz und gar verfehlt, das aufzuschreiben, worüber Margot und ich halbe Tage und Nächte lang reden, so intensiv und ehrlich von beiden Seiten, dass man sich fast um Kopf und Kragen redet. (Brief an Klaus Mann, 23. Juli 1940)

And again there was the long road, as straight as an arrow through the shimmering wall of fog, and the sudden apparition of the solitary columns of Persepolis on the terrace that seemed surreally suspended high above the plains

You know very well that no one can enter the heart of another and become as one, not even for the shortest moment. Even your mother only made you flesh, and at your first breath you breathed in solitude

Of all the names that linger in my memory after a long journey, this one is the dearest to me (Therapia). Perhaps because it sounds so Greek, blithe as a swelling paean to carefree days spent on lovely shores? Perhaps because it came at the beginning and now belongs to a long ago, glorified time-for the journey had just begun.

I saw it dissolve into a strangely clear horizon-there, a striated pyramid, stood the extinct volcano, a pain filled, deeply moving sight: permanence.

What were the present and future to him, he who did not fear the sandstorm? Did he know what fortune and misfortune mean, and what our tortured hearts called hope?

What was I waiting for? For signs and miracles, stars on the firmament..?

Letters have time, time costs nothing in these parts-let's return to the melons and peaches of Afghanistan.

This sufficed: the overwhelming monument to the man who had not feared the poverty and grandeur of the steppe, so alien to all human measure. I breathed deep and tried, despite all, to salute life...

I am left with the magic, the name, the heart miraculously touched.

In the grand and changeful panorama of the Hindu Kush, I miss the young green, the gentle wind, the stirring song of spring. But we do not dictate our dreams, and I didn't dare look back at the receding snowy peaks as I turned onto the plains.

In the first hour of the new day, in the cold, strong wind that already reaches our native shores, yes, in this one moment of eternally returning regret I realise: what staggers us, over and over again, is the morning splendour of departure!

Ver a una mujer: solo por un segundo, solo por el breve lapso de una mirada, para luego volver a perderla, en la oscuridad de un pasillo, tras una puerta que me está vedado abrir...