Austrian novelist (1888-1960)
Though she had been besieged, courted, and pursued by men who had fallen in love with her, she did not in her heart believe in the existence of love. It seemed to her as unreal as the painted drop scenes, the temples of love, and the banks of roses that formed the settings for her dances. But though she was cold and insensitive to love, she was esteemed a wonderful mistress. She herself practiced love as a duty imposed by her profession, a part to be played that might sometimes please but always fatigued her and called for a high degree of art.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
Serious difficulties don't vanish by themselves, they are standing around your bed when you open your eyes the next morning.
VICKI BAUM
It Was All Quite Different
A man with money to pay for a meal can talk about hunger without demeaning himself.... But for a man with no money hunger is a disgrace.
VICKI BAUM
Martin's Summer
Love is a word from the old poems you read. In real life there is no love. Men come together like apes and birds. It is sweet sometimes to play with a woman, but the wind blows and there is an end of it.
VICKI BAUM
Love and Death in Bali
Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.
VICKI BAUM
And Life Goes On
The lovely thing about real happiness is that it is there all of a sudden, unexpected, weightless as a little summer cloud and just as radiant and intangible.
VICKI BAUM
I Know What I'm Worth
Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
Curious, how each one of us secretly carries his private cemetery around with him and watches it filling up with ever new graves. The last one to be our own.
VICKI BAUM
I Know What I'm Worth
There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
VICKI BAUM
I Know What I'm Worth
The real thing is always going on somewhere else. When you're young you think it will come later. Later on you think it was earlier. When you are here, you think it is there--in India, in America, on Popocatepetl or somewhere. But when you get there, you find that life has doubled back and is quietly waiting here, here in the very place you ran away from.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
One imagines everything higher than it is, till one sees it. You come on your travels from your little provincial town with false ideas about life. Grand Hotel, you think. Most expensive hotel, you think. God knows what marvels you expect from a hotel like this. You'll soon know all about it. The whole hotel is only a rotten pub. It is exactly the same with the whole of life. The whole of life is a rotten pub, Herr Kringelein. You arrive, stay for a while and go on again.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may be unimportant or remarkable individuals. People on the way up or people on the way down the ladder of life. Prosperity and disaster may be separated by no more than the thickness of a wall.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
Pity is the deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman.
VICKI BAUM
Results of an Accident
Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize, he will still for months wake up in the night with a start, worrying about food and rent.
VICKI BAUM
And Life Goes On
Men don't make different mistakes at different periods of their lives. They make the same mistake over and over again and they pay a bigger and bigger price for it.
VICKI BAUM
Written on Water
Neither ventured on that fragile word--love. Together they glided into the vortex of their night of love. They went from an embrace to whispered talk, from whispering to sleep and dreams, from dreams to more embraces. These two had come together from the ends of the world to meet for a few hours in the hotel bed of Room No. 68 where so many had slept before them ...
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
He who does not move with the times is a dead man.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
Funny. You talk of life as if it were a train you have to catch up with. How long have you been trying, three days? And not got a glimpse of it yet, in spite of caviar and champagne?
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
Perfection bores me, in art, in music; most of all, in people. Luckily, perfection is rare.
VICKI BAUM
I Know What I'm Worth
In the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.
VICKI BAUM
Written on Water