Robert Musil Quotes

Maybe I'm like acts of Congress or your favorite Chinese restaurant - you don't really want to know what's going on behind the door. I'm a real study in contrast, I expect, looking from without. But it adds up to what you get on stage.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

They call me 'sweet,' and 'gentle'; and some of the men go the length of calling me 'endearing,' and I laugh in my sleeve and think, 'Oh, Lord! If you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!'

I wanted to portray very, very dark subject matter and a deceptively complex story in the brightest colours and simplest lines possible to leave the readers reeling.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

As a general thing, I've always been drawn to characters who appear to be one thing on the surface, but are actually something else underneath.

I think I appear very innocent and soft, but I'm actually very dark and edgy. It's a weird dichotomy.

Anybody's life is probably a mess of secrets and lies when you boil it right down.

I like the human mind and how messed up it is.

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour

I'm always perversely attracted to characters that seem one thing, but are ultimately revealed as another...

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

It crosses my mind that Cinna's calm and normal demeanor masks a complete madman.

My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.

I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.

If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.

I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.

I like neurotic people. I like troubled people. Not that I don't like squared-away people, but I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.

We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was.

She shows us only surfaces, but she is million-fathoms deep.

I wonder if anyone but me realizes what goes on in that head back of your deceptively sweet face.

...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)