After Midnight | 
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I wish I could read this book for the first time again.
"There is a cool, rotting smell in the air, as of graves broken open. It is spring. All that is dead begins to live again. What for? Just to die once more?"
"We are outside the café, in the street, disconsolate as unredeemed pawnbroker‘s pledges. We none of us know what to do with ourselves, we none of us know what to do with the others."
"And now I feel like crying, because I really do not understand, and I don‘t think I will when I‘m older either."
"Having got to know Liska the way a man
gets to know a woman only if he lives with her for years, sleeping with her all that time—well, he‘s got not to know her again. It‘s like reading a wonderful poem, and learning it off by heart because you like it so much and you want to be able to recite the whole thing. And when you do know it off by heart you can slowly begin to forget it again."
"He talked to me like a priest at a cut-price funeral."
"That stupid voice, so soft and velvety. What can you do about a pale-blue sort of voice like that? You can‘t argue with it, you can‘t get angry with it, you can‘t laugh at it. What does someone like Franz want with a voice anyway? He himself seems quite surprised to have one."
"These were always edifying moments. All this was so sacred to him that he couldn‘t talk about it, couldn‘t even mention it. He went on to talk about it."
"I‘ve often noticed how pleased and proud men are at having to knock in a certain way at the doors of perfectly harmless pubs, in order to get in. I expect there are some men who take to politics just for the sake of the secret signals you have to give."
"My head‘s full of confused, random thoughts, like a ball of wool I must knit into words. I must knit a stocking of words. It takes so long, and I forget what I was going to say a minute ago, as if I‘d dropped a stitch."
"Life‘s nearly always like that: you put difficulties in a person‘s way, and a slight aura of something dubious and unpleasant still clings to him whether it is his fault or not."
"Gerti thinks the good Lord will help them, because she‘s so beautiful, and the good Lord is a man."
"There are some very inferior riffraff among the Jews, he says, so he can understand anti-Semitism, and as for the armed forces, there are some fine fellows among them."
The more things change...
