Austrian novelist, playwright & journalist (1881-1942)
Their childish high spirits succeeded entirely in diverting my thoughts from the subject that they usually circled, like bees buzzing around a darkly oozing honey-comb, and no sooner did I step into the open air and feel my muscles stretched to the full again in an improvised race with the young woman than I was the fit, carefree boy of the past once more.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Confusion
Boldly, perhaps still warm from human bodies, the unmade double bed bore visible witness to the point and purpose of this room.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Journey Into the Past
No sooner had he said it than she understood, and he placed the room-key, heavy and shining, in his hand, so abruptly did that one sharply outlined, bright association plucked from the sleeping depths of memory come to the surface. The shadows there on the path had touched and woken her own words, and more besides. With a shiver running down his spine, he suddenly felt the full truth and sense of them. Had not those spectres searching for their past been muted questions, asked of a time that was no longer real, mere shadows wanting to come back to life but unable to do so now? Neither she nor he was the same any more, yet they were searching for each other in a vain effort, fleeing one another, persisting in disembodied, powerless efforts like those black spectres at their feet.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Journey Into the Past
Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
How ugly this room was, how shaming their presence here seemed, how disappointing was this moment when they were together, a moment longed for so much over the years--but neither he nor she had wanted it to be so sudden, to show itself in all its shameless nudity! For the space of three, four, five breaths--he counted them--he looked out, too cowardly to speak first, but then he forced himself to do so. No, no, this would not do, he said. And just as he had known and feared in advance, she stood in the middle of the room as if turned to stone in her grey dustcoat, her arms hanging down as if they had snapped, as if she were something that did not belong here and had entered this unpleasant room only by the accident of force and chance. She had taken off her gloves, obviously to put them down, but then she must have felt revulsion against the idea of placing them anywhere here, and so they dangled empty from her fingers, like the husks of her hands. Her gaze was fixed, her eyes veiled, but when he turned they looked at him with a plea in them. He understood. "Why don't we--" and his voice stumbled over the breath he was expelling-- "why don't we go for a little walk? It's so gloomy in here."
STEFAN ZWEIG
Journey Into the Past
Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called "success" with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can't reciprocate her feelings.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Letter from an Unknown Woman
The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Burning Secret and Other Stories
It is better to pay tribute of gold to the enemy than tribute of blood in war.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Jeremiah: a drama in nine scenes
Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The World of Yesterday
What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme--to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life.
STEFAN ZWEIG
letter to Richard Strauss, Mar. 14, 1935
On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Confusion of Feelings or Confusion
It is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termite-like.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Chess Story
Always the same dream, the same illusion. Night after night, the same terror seizes me, the same dream, culminating in the same torment. Who has instilled this dream poison into my veins? Who hunts me thus with terror? Who covets my sleep, that he must rob me of it; who is my torturer, and for whom must I thus hold vigil? Answer! Who art thou, invisible one, aiming at me from the darkness thy winged shafts? Who art thou, terror incarnate, coming to lie with me by night, quickening me with thy spirit until my frame is twisted as with labor pains? Wherefore in this slumbering city should the curse be laid on me alone?
STEFAN ZWEIG
Jeremiah: a drama in nine scenes
Verlaine was a man of moods, he was always only the creature of the moment. After a few seconds the movement of his will contracted limply and momentary desires overflooded his consciousness of personality. His faith may have been as capricious and restless, as each one of his tendencies of passion. Great poems, however, in the sense of great in extent, are not conceived in a moment. Moods spread like a fine mist over the poet's hours, they permeate them and fill them through and through for a long time before a poem takes form.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Paul Verlaine
Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity