Stefan Zweig

I breathed freely, purely, and full of sudden delight I felt the air on my lips like a clear drink. It was soft, effervescent air carrying on it the aroma of fruits, the scent of distant islands, and making me feel slightly drunk.

Now, for the first time since I had set foot on the ship’s planks, I knew the blessed joy of reverie, and the other more sensual pleasure of abandoning my body, womanlike, to the softness surrounding me.

The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite

these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

Without introducing himself—“You know who I am, and who you are is of no interest to me,”

During the last moves he must have recognized his real, his true opponent just as a horse knows a new, better rider by the way he takes the saddle.

You waited for something from morning until night, and nothing happened. You went on waiting and waiting. Nothing happened. You waited, waited, waited, thinking, thinking, thinking, until your temples throbbed. Nothing happened. You were alone. Alone. Alone.

At first I played the games through quite mechanically;

The only reason that this activity had become such a salutary and even soothing one for my shattered nerves was that playing through games that were not my own did not involve me personally; it was all the same to me whether Black or White won, it was Alekhine or Bogoljubov who was battling for the laurels of the champion, and I as a person, my intellect, my spirit took part solely as an observer, as a connoisseur of the peripeteias and the beauties of each game. But from the moment I began to play against myself, I began unwittingly to challenge myself. Each of my two selves, the black one and the white one, had to vie against the other, and each conceived its own ambition, its own impatience, to gain the ascendancy, to win; after each move as White, I was in a fever to know what Black would do. Each of the two selves exulted when the other made a mistake and became exasperated at its own bungling.

Something in me wanted to come out on top, and yet all there was for me to fight was this other me in me;