Steppenwolf
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Important Quotations Explained
1. He
went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless
he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal
. . . and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however,
was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. The cause
of this apparently was that at the bottom of his heart he knew all the
time (or thought he knew) that he was in reality not a man, but
a wolf of the Steppes.
2. “Oh!
how stiff you are! Just go straight ahead as if you were walking
. . . Dancing, don’t you see, is every bit as easy as thinking,
when you can do it, and much easier to learn. Now you can understand
why people won’t get the habit of thinking. . . .”
3. An
experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never
known in all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper
and student—the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious
merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy.
4. Again
I looked into the mirror. I had been mad. I must have been mad.
There was no wolf in the mirror, lolling his tongue in his maw.
It was I, Harry. . . . My face was gray, forsaken of all fancies,
wearied by all vice, horribly pale. Still it was a human being,
someone one could speak to.
“Harry,” I said,
“what are you doing there?”
“Nothing,” said
he in the mirror, “I am only waiting. I am waiting for death.”
“Where
is death then?”
“Coming,” said the other.
5. I
understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and
somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all
the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket . .
. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner
being. One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would
learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.
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