Robert Walser - The Walk:

"Secret rulers are the most proud and the most implacable... there are people who excel at concealing the crimes which they commit behind disarming, obliging behavior." (14)

"Yet I believe that struggling for life can only be a fine thing. It is not with pleasures and with joys that an honest man might grow proud. Rather in the roots of his soul it can only be through trial bravely undergone, deprivation patiently endured, that he becomes proud and gay. On this point, however, one does not like to waste words." (21)

"... for I shall never understand, how it can be called a pleasure to hurtle past all the images and objects which our beautiful earth displays, as if one had gone mad and had to accelerate for fear of despair." (27)

"But one realizes to be sure to satiety that he loves to walk as well as he loves to write; the latter of course perhaps just a shade less than the former." (29)

"I am surely justified in assuming that I can effect the reorganization and regrouping of forces as well as any field marshal surveying all circumstances and drawing all contingencies and reverses into the net of his, I am permitted to say, genius for computation.
An industrious person at present can read things of this sort daily in the daily papers. Assuredly he notes each choice expressions as 'flank attack,' etc.
Might I confess that I have recently come to the conclusion that the art of war can be just as difficult, and require almost as much patience, as the art of writing, the converse being also true?
Writers also, much like generals, often make the most laborious preparations before they dare march to the attack and give battle: in other words, fling their book or artistic or shoddy product into the book market, an action which sometimes vigorously provokes very forceful counterattacks. As is known, books attract potentially relevant discussions, which sometimes end in such a fury that the book must disappear at once, while apparently the lamentable, poor, miserable writer pitiably asphyxiates and qutie doubtless despairs of it all." (34)

"He was at home everywhere and nowhere. He had no home country, and so was nowhere a citizen. Completely without happiness he lived, without love, without motherland and human joy.
He had sympathy with no man, and so with him and his mopping and mowing no man had sympathy. Past, present, and future were to him an insubstantial desert, and life appeared to be too small, too narrow for him. For him nothing existed which had meaning: and he himself in turn meant something to nobody at all. Out of his eyes there broke a glare of grief from underworlds and overworlds, and indescribable pain spoke from each of his slack and weary movements.
Not dead, but also not alive, neither old nor young was he. A hundred thousand years old he seemed to me, and it furthermore seemed to me that he must live for eternity, only to be for eternity no living being. Every instant he was dying, and yet he could not die. For him there was nowhere a grave with flowers on it." (36)

"Suddently there came upon me an unnameable feeling for the world, and, together with it, a feeling of gratitude which broke powerfully out of my joyful soul." (38)

"The stillness kindled prayers in the feeling soul." (39)

"Writers who understand their profession at least a little take the same as easily as possible. From time to time they like to lay their pens aside a while. Uninterrupted writing fatigues, like digging." (40)

"Since I had to agree that it was impossible to accomplish anything, and considering that an alas perhaps excessively fiery, impetuous onslaught had been transformed into the most painful and ignominious of defeats, I withdrew my troops from this unfortunate engagement, broke feebly off, and flew the field in shame." (57)

"I enjoy, as a poor writer or homme de lettres, a very dubious income... I am extremely free from wealth, but, on the other hand laden with every sort of poverty, as you might be so kind as to write in your notebook." (58)

"Without walking, I would be dead, and would have long since been forced to abandon my profession, which I love passionately. Also, without walking and gathering reports, I would not be able to render the tiniest report, nor to produce an essay, let alone a story." (60)

"Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it, without this equally delicious and instructive, equally refreshing and constantly admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and indeed am lost." (61)

"In short: by thinking, pondering, drilling, digging, speculating, writing, investigating, researching, and walking, I earn my daily bread with as much sweat on my brow as anybody." (64)

"My walk was becoming more beautiful and long. Here at the railway crossing seemed to be something like the leak, or the center, from which again the gentle declivity would begin, I thought to myself. Already I sensed something like the just-beginning, gentle slope of evening. Something akin to sorrow's bliss breathed around me as a quiet, lofty god. 'It is divinely beautiful here.' I thought again." (66)

"Earlier walks came before my eyes. But the wonderful image of the present swiftly became a feeling which overpowered all others. All notion of the future paled and the past dissolved. In the glowing present I myself glowed... The earth became a dream: I myself had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world." (67)

"I report, being so permitted, that on the small building abounded wall paintings or frescoes, which subtly showed a Swiss alpine landscape in which stood, amusingly painted again, a Bernese mountain farmhouse. Admittedly, the painting was not good at all. It would be impudent to maintain that it was a work of art. But, nonetheless, to me it seemed delightful. Simple and plain as it was, it even enchanted me. As a matter of fact, any sort of painting enchants me, however clumsy it is, because every painting reminds me first of diligence and industry, and second of Holland. Is not all music, even the most niggardly, beautiful to the person who loves the very being and existence of music." (69)

"Perhaps there were a few repetitions here and there, but I would like to confess that I consider nature and human life to be a solemn and charming flow of fleeting approximations, which strikes me as a phenomenon which I believe to be beautiful and replete with blessings.
That in some places one finds sensation-hungry novelty hunters, spoiled by frequent overexcitement, who are unhappy if they cannot almost every instant covet joys that have never been seen before — of this I am well aware.
On the whole I consider a constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding. It is little children for whom one must always be producing something new and different, in order to stop their being dissatisfied. The serious writer can in no way feel called upon to supply an accumulation of material, to act the agile servant of fretful greed; and consequently he is not at all afraid of a few repetitions, although of course he takes continual, industrious trouble to forfend frequent similarities." (86)

"As I observed earth and air and sky, a melancholy overwhelming thought seized hold of me that forced me to say to myself that I was a poor prisoner between heaven and earth, that we all were miserably locked up in such a way, that for all of us there was nowhere a path into the other world save the one path that led down into the pit, into the earth, into the grave." (88)

"'Did I pick flowers to lay them upon my sorrow?' I asked myself, and the flowers fell out of my hand. I had risen up, to go home, for it was late now and everything was dark." (89)