Herzog

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: /Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

This isn’t worth dismantling. Can’t you rent it out?

“Okay. Next trip, I’ll get her a piano.”

To Dr. Waldemar Zozo: You, Sir, were the Navy psychiatrist who examined me in Norfolk, Va., about 1942, and told me I was unusually immature. I knew that, but professional confirmation caused me deep anguish.

On the sofa he found proof that the place was indeed visited by lovers.

I grew up in a time of widespread unemployment, and never believed there might be work for me. Finally, jobs appeared, but somehow my consciousness remained unemployed. And after all, he continued beside the fire, the human intellect is one of the great forces of the universe. It can’t safely remain unused. You might almost conclude that the boredom of so many human arrangements (middle-class family life, for instance) has the historical aim of freeing the intellect of newer generations, sending them into science.

looked too hopeless—past regretting. He would never have the strength to throw himself into such tasks again

The wrong side of the bars—he felt it with his cheek. And here were the toilet bowl, the bare metal bunk, and the flies on the ceiling. This, Herzog realized, was not the sphere of his sins. He was merely passing through. Out in the streets, in American society, that was where he did his time

And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings, can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning

Herzogs are made of finer clay?