Colin Wilson Quote

Steppenwolf knows well enough why he is unhappy and drifting, bored and tired; it is because he will not recognize his purpose and follow it with his whole being.‘He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self, and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death.’ Haller knows that even when the Outsider is a universally acknowledged man of genius, it is due to ‘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 rarifies 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