I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.

— Robert Walser

I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.

— Robert Walser

I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called "the world," and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.

— Robert Walser

I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.

— Robert Walser

My cheeks are red-hot, my lip still trembles, because I sent my hereto speak; every word of it delusional and awkward, an exuberance, an abrupt sound. That's how I spoke, oh, it still shows on my hot cheeks'm now carrying home. I look down at the snow and walk past many houses, past many hedges, many trees, the snow adorns hedge, tree and house. I walk on, staring Downey the snow, on my cheeks nothing but red-hot memory reminding me of my wild talk.

— Robert Walser

One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.

— Robert Walser

On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.

— Robert Walser

Se burden quines see pagan la Vida Esperanto Que also Los estimate DESE era...

— Robert Walser

So you, too, like fruitcake? (RAW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)

— Robert Walser

That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.

— Robert Walser