How we cite our quotes: (Preface if applicable, Paragraph)
Quote #1
It was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related in Haller's manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences. (Preface 43)
The narrator of the preface isn't calling Harry a liar; rather, he's saying that Harry's records are a sort of an art. He created them in order to try to communicate something that is really hard to put into words. Do you think that there are experiences that are impossible to put down into words? Have you ever had one?
Quote #2
He said to me once when we were talking of the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: "These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of pour present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous." (49)
Harry believes that a person is a product of their time, and that the context a person is born into determines the way that they perceive of reality. This is important because at the time that Hesse wrote the novel the world was in a shambles—right after the First World War and right before the Second. Rather than trying to escape and imagine that other times were better or worse, the novel proposes that people live in their own time.
Quote #3
So now I had two portraits of myself before me, one a self-portrait in doggerel verse, as sad and sorry as myself; the other painted with the air of a lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew more and yet less of me than I did myself. (80)
This kind of reminds us of the Great Goethe Picture scandal, where the picture in Harry's mind doesn't match someone else's idea of what the poet looked like. Here, though, the portrait is of Harry himself.