Book Specs 📖

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

After the embarrassment of asking a wealthy paraplegic daughter to dance, the young cavalry officer becomes a slave to his destructive sympathies.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• Author’s note – herd mentality
• Role of pity
• being loved against yourwill
• herd mentality
• pity – makes hm a good and a slave
• Zwieg does something very interesting in the novel with the characters that are of high prestige in the novel. He descibes them as being

“Quotes”🗣

There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an indivudal to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream…

It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.

…once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has been given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering, acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.

For one’s emotional state is always determined by the most odd and accidental things, and it is precisely the most superficial factors that often fortify or diminish our courage.

…it is always madness that first gives one an insight into the intensity of a passion….

For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but neatly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in the world.

But all that one has heard and read passes one by; it is only from personal experience that the heart can learn the true nature of its emotions.

Even the most wretched, the most pitiable creature has her pride….

It is characteristic of those who love to have an uncanny insight into the true feelings of the beloved; and since love, according to the inmost laws of its being, ever desires the illimitable, all finiteness, all moderation, is repugnant, intolerable to it.

Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us…

A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people’s lives a burden with her presence.