How we cite our quotes: (Preface if applicable, Paragraph)
Quote #1
As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one's neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair. (Preface 22)
Usually we don't equate having low self-esteem with being egocentric, but that seems to be what the narrator is suggesting here. What do you think about the idea that someone who hates him- or herself is actually really self-centered?
Quote #2
I was much astonished that the hermit had his love, and one so young and pretty and elegant; and all my conjectures about him and his life were upset once more. But before an hour had gone he came back alone and dragged himself wearily upstairs with his sad and heavy tread. (Preface 41)
Contrast this lonely scene with the girl-filled romps to come; the isolation Harry feels with his girlfriend Erica is a big contrast to his relationships with Maria and Hermine.
Quote #3
Haller belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell. (Preface 48)
Harry is living in the past, stuck with his classical music, and just can't figure out how to live in the modern world with its newfangled jazz and radios. Oh, but he'll learn…
Quote #4
Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! (18)
This thought of Harry's shows us that he isn't always such a hermit because he likes it; in fact, he sometimes really wishes for some company. Later Harry will learn that this kind of wish is accessible to him through the Magic Theater.
Quote #5
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. (19)
Very interesting. It seems that Harry isn't a loner just because people don't like him or because he doesn't know how to make friends. This quote shows us that he actually wanted to be alone, and worked toward keeping people away from him.
Quote #6
Independently and alone, he decided what to do and to leave undone. […] But in the midst of the freedom he had attained Harry suddenly became aware that his freedom was a death and that he stood alone. (38)
Oops. Another case of "be careful what you wish for." Previously Harry equated solitude with independence, but can you think of some exceptions to that rule? What is the price of independence? Do you think that giving up some of your freedom might be worthwhile if you get some help from your friends out of the bargain?
Quote #7
No one came near to him. There was no link left, and no one could have had any part in his life even had anyone wished it. (38)
This sentence, which comes from the Treatise on the Steppenwolf, sounds like a punishment. It seems like Harry has no escape because he has built up his loneliness so securely.
Quote #8
His tendency is to explain Mozart's perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane. (62)
So Harry thinks that Mozart is a genius because he has been blessed; it sounds like the author of the Treatise thinks that the way to being a genius is actually to suffer a whole lot and to isolate oneself completely. At least that would give you time to think? And the shout-out to the Garden of Gethsemane is the ultimate lonely scene: Jesus is praying for his life when one of his closest friends betrays him.
Quote #9
She came to see me now and then, or I made the journey to her, and since both of us were lonely, difficult people related somehow to one another in soul, and sickness of soul, there was a link between us that held in spite of all. (79)
It sounds like Harry and Erica, his on-again off-again girlfriend, don't have too much in common other than being lonely. It seems interesting that Harry, who works so hard to be alone and lonely, would even bother with having a girlfriend. Maybe she just reaffirms to him that he is unlovable because they can't get along.
Quote #10
[…] Though I really found it all ridiculous, I could not help enjoying these crumbs of warmth and kindliness, and was lapping them up like a starved dog. (85)
In this quote food is a metaphor for kindness, which shows how vital it is to survival; the starved dog is Harry, because he has very little kindness in his lonely life. Poor little lonely wolf pup.