"The Blue Flower"

[fiefoe]

• He said aloud, ‘The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards.’
• It was discontent that, at last, was making Just truly happy. Although, short of dismantling and re-constructing the entire garden-house nothing could now be done about the Vorbau, he would never be quite satisfied with it, never cease to build and rebuild it in his mind. The universe, after all, is within us.
• fine young woman still, what a pity she has no affianced to treat her to a pig’s nostril!
• Karoline turned to Erasmus, as though to another survivor from drowning. ‘This is really all I need,’ she thought, ‘one moment only with someone who feels as I do.’
• In any case, with the coming of the nineteenth century, a time when, as Kant had foreseen, men would at last have learned to govern themselves, pulleys and tread wheels would in all probability have no place.
• ‘to an entirely new land, and dark stars’. The mining industry, it seemed to him, was not a science, but an art. Could anyone but an artist, a poet, understand the relationship between the rocks and the constellations?
• Courage makes us dreamers, courage makes us poets.’ ‘But it would not make Söphgen into a competent house-keeper,’
• Fritz was there already, coming towards her up the path from the lower garden. ‘Mother, you know I would not keep you waiting.’ The numberless times he had done so no longer existed.
• Throughout the house there could be sensed, as when music changes not its theme but its key, a little less concentration on the soul, a little more on the body.
• the airy space faithfully carried every note, balanced it, and let it fall reluctantly.
• the Hardenbergs’ invitations, but they were so rare—this was not thought of as meanness, everyone knew of their piety and charity—and so formally expressed, that they seemed less of a celebration than a register of slowly passing time, like mortality itself.
• Both girls were in white, run up by the same dressmaker, but Sidonie seemed to be moving in flight or in a drift of whiteness, delicate, weightless, strange to the onlookers of Weissenfels。
• Uncertainty and expectancy moved among the guests like the first warning of fever, touching even the most stolid.
• first husband had also been very noisy, and neither of them had had any more effect on her than windy weather.
• ‘We have to believe in someone,’ said Karoline. ‘Another one, I mean, besides ourselves, or life would be a poor thing.’
• How else can the needy pass their spare time, except with music?
• A feeling of disharmony comes over me when a stranger approaches me with spectacles on his nose.’
• This person must have been singled out as distinct from all the rest of his family. It was a matter of recognising your own fate and greeting it as familiar when it came.
• In spite of the family’s difficulties he always went to the best inns, for he knew of no others.
• Each house stood prepared according to its capacity, secreting its treasure of vinegar and firewood.
• ‘As things are, we are the enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement.