Robert Musil Quotes

I was overlooked long before anyone knew who I was.

What I try to do is write about forgotten people, and, in a certain sense, we're all forgotten.

I feel like, the more you hang around, the more you're forgotten. It doesn't matter how good you are.

When you are the woman upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you “best of all.” It's a small thing, you might think, and maybe it depends on your temperament, maybe for some people it's a small thing, but for me [...]

And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

I was never in the top category of anything. I was never on people's lists. I was never the potential anything!

We're a sport that was in obscurity for so long, we started to get used to that.

Out of sight is out of mind.

He barely knew I existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl in the background, several degrees of seperation removed.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

My life is like a lone, forgotten Q-Tip in the second-to-last drawer.

I only had the right to sit in the shadows of the world,in complete silence. Whether I was laughed at, or told I was discusting, or thought of as unpleasant I would sit in the shadows.

I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.

I like mainly to be invisible, to sort of drift around unseen in the world.

Strange how short-sighted being invisible can make you.

Without a safe haven, one of the most authentic parts of who you are, who you love, felt invisible to the world.

If ever they remembered their life in this world it was as one remembers a dream.

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

Quit the world, and the world forgets you.

Monuments may be builded to express the affection or pride of friends, or to display their wealth, but they are only valuable for the characters which they perpetuate.

We are not apt to think of the importance of events as they transpire with us, but we feel the importance of them afterwards.

How often we see the greatest genius buried in obscurity!

All things show up in the world according to the purposes we ascribe to them.