How we cite our quotes: (Preface if applicable, Paragraph)
Quote #1
During that very first conversation, about the araucaria, he called himself the Steppenwolf, and this too estranged and disturbed me a little. What an expression! However, custom did not only reconcile me to it, but soon I never thought of him by any other name; nor could I today hit on a better description of him. (Preface 35)
Harry has constructed the idea of the Steppenwolf to explain his nature to himself and others; the narrator's reaction (disturbed) shows how it can be a little bit creepy to have someone showing up and claiming to be half-wolf. Let Tyler Lautner be warned.
Quote #2
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him. (7)
Now we get Harry's own description of the Steppenwolf; he also could have called himself an unfrozen caveman, if you ask us.
Quote #3
And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. (33)
Harry must be a real black-and-white thinker, because he can't figure out a way to conceive of himself as a civilized person if he also has an animal nature. That's why he has to invent the Steppenwolf.
Quote #4
There were those, whoever, who loved precisely the wolf in him, the free, the savage, the untamable, the dangerous and strong, and these found it peculiarly disappointing and deplorable when suddenly the wild and wicked wolf was also a man, and had hankerings after goodness and refinement, and wanted to hear Mozart, to read poetry and to cherish human ideals. (35)
We can see that Harry isn't the only one who has a problem reconciling fancy taste and grouchy, wolf-like behavior: it seems like it's a problem that society has in accepting that people can be really surprising.
Quote #5
These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. (37)
The people being described here are constructed using opposites: God, the devil; mother, father; happiness, suffering. The novel seems to be showing us, though, that there are more than just two answers to every question. How does this war happen in you or people you know? Are there parts of your personality that seem contradictory? How do you deal with them?
Quote #6
He is no were-wolf at all, and if we appeared to accept without scrutiny this lie which he invented for himself and believes in, and tried to regard him literally as a two-fold being and a Steppenwolf, and so designated him, it was merely in the hope of being more easily understood with the assistance of a delusion, which we must now endeavor to put in its true light. (55)
Here we go… the treatise is laying the smack down on Harry's Steppenwolf concept. It seems like the Steppenwolf invention is really just a way of making it easier to understand Harry, because he can't think of a better way to explain his contradictory desires. However, the treatise knows that everyone is full of contradictions and they don't need to be simplified to be understood.
Quote #7
And while I, Harry Haller, stood there in the street, flattered and surprised and studiously polite and smiling into the good fellow's kindly, short-sighted face, there stood the other Harry, too, at my elbow and grinned likewise. (85)
You know those moments where you want to laugh at a funeral or scream in the middle of the library? Maybe that's just your other, mischievous self coming out.
Quote #8
Within me, the battle raged furiously. (86)
For Harry identity is a violent concept. In this metaphor he compares his desires to be social and be antisocial, which are pretty contradictory, to a war going on inside of him.