Joseph Roth Quotes

#1. It is the - actually profoundly unartistic - impulse to produce exterior likeness rather than inner truth: the same impulse as naturalistic photograpy and the copy.

Joseph Roth

#2. There is a fear of voluptuousness that is itself voluptuous, just as a certain fear of death can itself be deadly.

Joseph Roth

#3. What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.

Joseph Roth

#4. Our living room had a clock in it that used to clear its throat before striking the hours. He is that harrumphing.

Joseph Roth

#5. Taittinger pondered, but he was well aware that no amount of pondering had yet helped him to a sensible conclusion.

Joseph Roth

#6. That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

Joseph Roth

#7. I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish.

Joseph Roth

#8. A puff of wind blew out their skirts, and they looked like two wandering flags.

Joseph Roth

#9. She wasn't the first, nor the last. These are the women he crosses paths with. He doesn't become her destiny, nor she his. They are his episodes, and luckily he too is just an episode. He wanders along on the fringes of danger, and nibbles at them.

Joseph Roth

#10. Perhaps one can see one's destiny accomplished before one's very eyes and still feel hungry.

Joseph Roth

#11. Anyone called upon to view misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.

Joseph Roth

#12. He wore a gleaming top hat. He had a pomaded, uptwirled black moustache. He looked like a first-class funeral.

Joseph Roth

#13. When I leave the hotel the porter stands beside the revolving door, primed to greet me, like a talking fork.

Joseph Roth

#14. The windows in the soup kitchen are never opened, and for that reason the aroma of old meals lingers in corners and rises from the table tops - which are never washed - when the steam from the freshly cooked food brings them back to life.

Joseph Roth

#15. And in the evening concealed fluorescent tubes light the room so evenly that it is no longer illuminated, it is a pool of luminosity.

Joseph Roth

#16. But our tram needs its overhead wires, and the wires need long, bare, wooden poles, with a couple of china pots flowering at the top end, for purposes of electricity. A caricature of a snowdrop.

Joseph Roth

#17. A skyscraper is the incarnate rebellion against the supposedly unattainable; against the mystery of altitude, against the otherworldliness of the cerulean.

Joseph Roth

#18. The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death. They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them.

Joseph Roth

#19. Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world. 96

Joseph Roth

#20. His round cheeks are of a red that seems to glow from within, as if he had a lit candle in his mouth like a paper lantern at a summer fete.

Joseph Roth

#21. Lieutenant Trotta wasn't experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written.

Joseph Roth

#22. I am thankful once again to strip off an old life, as I so often have during these years. I look back upon a soldier, a murderer, a man almost murdered, a man resurrected, a prisoner, a wanderer.

Joseph Roth

#23. But the policeman radiates the calm and ease of a traffic light;

Joseph Roth

#24. The conductor was eating a young ladies' cinema nibble with a rigid, humourless expression, as though it was the doorstop or hunk of sausage that would have accorded with his personality.

Joseph Roth

#25. Astonishing, really, that they still look human. They ought to look like megaphones, like screams, like brutal desires, like beery ecstasies ... like decadent barism. But the unconscious drive to remain in God's image seems to be so strong that not even the six-day races can quite eradicate it.

Joseph Roth

#26. A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

Joseph Roth

#27. 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.

Joseph Roth

#28. Only the small things in life are important

Joseph Roth

#29. Misery crouches beside me, ever larger and ever gentler; pain takes an interest, becomes huge and kind; terror flutters up, and it doesn't even frighten me anymore. And that'a the most desolate thing of all.

Joseph Roth

#30. On Sundays the world is as bright and empty as a balloon.

Joseph Roth

#31. Dazzled by the luminosity of logic, she leans back, closing her eyes. She loses herself, she is lost.

Joseph Roth

#32. That is originally why the concept evolved to include accessories. We found that furniture sells better when you show it with accessories.

Joseph Roth

#33. They talk about prohibition in America. What can one do in a country such as that?
'What does one do in America when one is sad - without alcohol?' asks Zwonimir.

Joseph Roth

#34. A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.

Joseph Roth

#35. If someone had the ability to sit at every table at once, he would hear nothing but good about himself, and yet even such contortions would pale in comparison to those of the others.

Joseph Roth

#36. The calendrical harshness of nature is nothing to the boundless cruelty of history.

Joseph Roth

#37. Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them.

Joseph Roth

#38. Of course, it's the things you're not told that arouse your interest. The gaps in the news are the interesting bits.

Joseph Roth

#39. I might be capable of making figures that have heart, conscience, passion, emotion and decency. But there's no call for that at all in the world. People are only interested in monsters and freaks, so I give them their monsters. Monsters are what they want!

Joseph Roth

#40. Morning birdsong filled the room. For all his high opinion of birds, privileged among God's creatures, still, deep in his heart, the Emperor did not trust them, just as he did not trust artists.

Joseph Roth

#41. I think it's our unique product selection and the idea that everything we sell only can be purchased at Ikea.

Joseph Roth

#42. Somebody cracks a joke, a whole row laughs, one witticism sets off another, and, like matches, they flare up and burn down.

Joseph Roth

#43. But the sound of despair is never pleasant; it sounds suspiciously like lying.

Joseph Roth

#44. The woman who had escaped with her life now wept for the loss of her umbrella and was not at all grateful that her limbs were intact.

Joseph Roth

#45. The good man believed that shortsighted people were also deaf and that their spectacles would become clearer if their ears heard more sharply.

Joseph Roth

#46. [O]ur relationship with nature has become warped. You see, nature has acquired a purpose where we are concerned. Its task is to amuse us. It no longer exists for its own sake.

Joseph Roth

#47. I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.

Joseph Roth

#48. Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk.

Joseph Roth