Quotes from Vicki Baum

Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.

Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize, he will still for months wake up in the night with a start, worrying about food and rent.

Pity is the deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman.

Neither ventured on that fragile word--love. Together they glided into the vortex of their night of love. They went from an embrace to whispered talk, from whispering to sleep and dreams, from dreams to more embraces. These two had come together from the ends of the world to meet for a few hours in the hotel bed of Room No. 68 where so many had slept before them ...

Funny. You talk of life as if it were a train you have to catch up with. How long have you been trying, three days? And not got a glimpse of it yet, in spite of caviar and champagne?

In the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.

Perfection bores me, in art, in music; most of all, in people. Luckily, perfection is rare.

Courage comes and goes. Hold on for the next supply.

Marriage always demands the finest arts of insincerity possible between two human beings.

There is a need for heroism in American life today.

He who does not move with the times is a dead man

A writer should always have some profession which brings him into close contact with the reality's of life.

The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces.

The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may be unimportant or remarkable individuals. People on the way up or people on the way down the ladder of life. Prosperity and disaster may be separated by no more than the thickness of a wall.

Die Götter haben Menschen nicht gemacht, damit sie arbeiten, bis sie vor Müdigkeit umfallen, sondern damit sie sich des Lebens freuen und dass sie Zeit haben, Feste auszurichten und genügend zu rasten.

They craned their heads like schoolboys to gaze at the malachite green fountain pen from London. It was an object well worth the attention of these five adult businessmen for three minutes.

Or lastly, four steps farther along the passage, a skeleton key, and an innocent air if he were discovered in the wrong bedroom. But that was not his way. It was not his way at all. "Everyone must do as his nature bids," as Gaigern had tried to explain to his confederates, that little band of crooks whom for two and a half years he had kept balanced on the verge of mutiny.

Then the doors closed throughout the hotel. Everyone locked himself in behind the double doors and each was left alone with himself and his secrets.

This is no life. No life at all. But where is there any life? Nothing happens. Nothing goes on. Boring. Old. Dead. Ghastly." Every object around him was a sham. Whatever he took up turned to dust. The world was a crumbling affair not to be grasped or held. You fell from emptiness to emptiness. You carried around a sack of darkness inside you. Doctor Otternschlag lived in the uttermost loneliness - although the earth is full of people like him . . .

There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.

It is an odd thing about the guests in a big hotel. Not a single one goes out through the revolving door the same as when he came in.

The revolving door turns and turns and turns.

Doctor Zinnowitz sent me to make the copies. I ought to explain, I am Flämmchen, the person he said he would send along," she said without ceremony. She had a dab of red lipstick in the center of her lips, dabbed on quite casually, merely because it was the fashion.

Courage comes and goes. Hold on for the next supply.