Quotes from 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.

That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring--and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed.