Quotes from Max Frisch

Blinders als blind ist die Aengstlicher

Wir sind nicht fertig geworden miteinander. Und darum, glaube ich, haben wir uns trotz allem nicht trennen können. Der arme Monsieur Dmitritsch! Er könnte alle ersinnbaren Qualitäten eines Mannes haben, vergeblich, er würde nie aufkommen gegen das Vakuum, das uns verbindet.

Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.

Es stimmt nicht einmal, daß ich immer nur mich selbst beschrieben habe. Ich habe mich selbst nie beschrieben. Ich habe mich nur verraten.

der Terror, scheint es, eignet sich beonders zur Vernichtung sittlicher Menschen.

Novels are no use at all on days like these, they deal with people and their relationships, with themselves and others, fathers and mothers and daughters or sons, lovers, etc., with individual souls, usually unhappy ones, with society, etc., as if the place for these things were assured, the earth for all time earth, the sea level fixed for all time.)

I stand still so as not to hear steps in my apartment, steps that are after all only my own. The whole thing isn't tragic, merely tiresome. You can't wish yourself good night . . . Is that a reason for marrying?

Ich glaube, ich werde älter; so jung schon fängt das an.

Our journey wasn't easy, though often curious: I bored her with my experience of life, she made me old by waiting from morning to evening, wherever we were, for my enthusiasm . . .

Sehen Sie«, sagte er und zuckte die Achseln, »wir haben so Erinnerungen, wir Menschen. Sie halten uns immer wieder auf; all die Jahre denkt man an irgendeinen Morgen, einen Freitag, einen Morgen mit Oliven … Sie müssen das verstehen.«

Es ist schade«, sagte ich rauchend, »daß du ein Geist bist.«

I confessed I knew nothing about art—she based her view on a saying of her mother's that anyone can respond to a work of art except the cultured philistine. "That's very kind of your mother!" I said.

Jemand sagte mir, daß Dinge, die wir für Erinnerung halten, Gegenwart sind. Es überzeugt. Dann wieder verwirrt es. Denn es nimmt den Dingen, die uns begegnen, schlechterdings die Zeit, und oft weiß ich nicht mehr, wo in meinem Leben ich mich eigentlich befinde. Das ist sehr abenteuerlich. Ich treffe Leute, die gar nicht mehr sind, und rede mit ihnen.

I can't bear being told what I ought to feel; although I can see the subject under discussion, I feel like a blind man.

What I heard was the usual story: marriage, a child (which I didn't quite catch, obviously, otherwise I shouldn't have asked again later on), then the war, a prison camp, return to Düsseldorf and so on; it shook me to think how time passes, how we grow older.

When thou shewest Respect to any one, see that thy Submissions be proportionable to the Homage thou owest him. There is Stupidity and Pride in doing too little; but in over acting of it, there is Abjection and Hypocrisy.

She was seriously disappointed, a child I was treating like a woman, or a woman I was treating like a child, I didn't know myself which it was.

Not being shaved gives me the feeling I'm some sort of plant and I keep involuntarily feeling my chin.

They were obviously Americans, I could hear their voices as the party wandered around our tomb; to judge by the voices, they might have been stenographers from Cleveland. "Oh, isn't it lovely?" "Oh, is this the Campagna?" "Oh, how lovely it is here!

The ladies' mauve-dyed hair interspersed with the bald patches of the gentlemen, who had taken off their panama hats—they must have broken out of an old-age home, I thought, but I didn't say it.

Ivy was a model, she chose her clothes to match the color of the car, I think, and the color of the car to match her lipstick or the other way around, I'm not sure which it was.

the Indians were far too gentle, too peaceable, positively childlike. They squatted for whole evenings in their white straw hats on the earth, motionless as toadstools, content without light, silent. The sun and moon were enough light for them, an effeminate race, eerie but innocuous.

At times he got on my nerves, like all artists who think themselves loftier or more profound beings simply because they don't know what electricity is.

A race like these Mayas, who hadn't discovered the wheel and built pyramids and temples in the jungle, where everything becomes smothered in moss and crumbles with damp—what for?