“Siddhartha suddenly remembered something she had
once said to him a long time ago. "You cannot love," she had said to him and he had agreed with her. He
had compared himself with a star, and other people with falling leaves, and yet he had felt some reproach in
her words.
It was true that he had never fully lost himself in another person to such an extent as to forget
himself; he had never undergone the follies of love for another person.
He had never been able to do this,
and it had then seemed to him that this was the biggest difference between him and the ordinary people. But
now, since he was there, he, Siddhartha, had become completely like one of the people, through sorrow,
through loving. He was madly in love, a fool because of love. Now he also experienced belatedly, for once
in his life, the strongest and strangest passion; he suffered tremendously through it and yet was uplifted, in
some way renewed and richer.
He felt indeed that this love, this blind love, was a very human passion, that it was Samsara, a
troubled spring of deep water. At the same time he felt that it was not worthless, that it was necessary, that it
came from his own nature. This emotion, this pain, these follies also had to be experienced.”