Then came those years in which I was forced to recognize the existence of a drive within me that had to make itself small and hide from the world of light. The slowly awakening sense of my own sexuality overcame me, as it does every person, like an enemy and terrorist, as something forbidden, tempting, and sinful. What my curiosity sought, what dreams, lust and fear created - the great secret of puberty - did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious self lived within the familiar and sanctioned world; it denied the new world that dawned within me. Side by side with this I lived in a world of dreams, drives and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the childhood world within me was falling apart [...] It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.
More from Hermann Hesse
I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
Permalink to quote #11 We aren't pigs as you seem to think, but human beings. We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.
Permalink to quote #13 I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.
Permalink to quote #10