Berlin Alexanderplatz

There were people flocking to him from all directions. He held the key to every heart.

Once, gentlemen, when I was, when I was feeling rotten, two Jews helped me by telling stories. They spoke to me, they’re decent people who didn’t know me at all, and then they told me about some Pole or other, and that was only a story but it was very good as well though, very educational for me in that situation I was in. I thought brandy would ha

Behold, the ball does not fly just as you throw it and where one wants, it flies roughly like it, but it goes a little bit further and perhaps a big bit further you know, and then a little bit to one side.”

Can happen to you that you run around and can’t read no names on any streets. Clever people helped me then, talked to me and told me things, people with nous, and that’s how you learn: you shouldn’t swear by money or by brandy or by the miserable few pence of union dues. What matters is to have common sense and use it, and so you know what’s going

What filthy rotten luck, it’s a flamin’ disaster, I feel like smashin’ the whole world to pulp.

We like to have a laugh here, we’re cheerful, our life here is great, from early evening until late.”

You don’t shed any tears over your old trousers when they’re moth-eaten and worn out, you buy new ones, and that is what this world lives off.

The peasants had sucked me as dry as a failed harvest, I would have perished, I went among men and did not perish.”

He was innocent as a new-born lamb. And look, he had so little fear of the world: the greatest, the most powerful people who exist, the most dreadful people, they were his friends: the Saxon Elector, the Crown Prince of Prussia who was later a great war hero, before whom that Austrian woman, the Empress Theresa, trembled on her throne. Zannovich di