P.38 if you’re not a communist by seventeen, you have no heart, but if
you’re still one when you’re thirty, you have no brains.
P.81 a dream, but true. melancholy is more righteous than anger. b feels
on edge, and so smiles confidently. stands up. i am getting closer to the
future. bahnhof zoo, the end of the line. nice beginning, in a heap of
dirt. the ability to search. the desire for subculture? that too, and the
realisation: that there is no happiness here and now. whoever knows this
lets contradictions stand and concentrates on what’s feasible, has a
future.
Afterword - Ben Miller
P.92 The crucial stylistic decision to write in all lowercase lends the
english-language text an air of 1970s informality bu tin German does
something even more radical. German nouns are all capitalised: objects
cruise through a sea of description and action like Prussian battleships
in the Baltic Sea. Forcing everything into lowercase has the effect of
confusing objects and actions. It emphasises process: it radically
destabilises.
P.93 If politics are aesthetics — if we confuse the look and feel of
resistance with he actual labour or organising, which has a lot to do with
craft, in its own way — then nothing is politics, and nothing is
aesthetics either. We rob ourselves both of our ability to act and to
create, of our ability to organise and to describe.
P.102 Writing and thinking well are not acts of resistance any more than
subculture is automatically resistant. They are not sufficient — but they
are certainly necessary.