# Quote — Hermann Hesse, Demian

> Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him — for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood. Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men — each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature — are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, story telling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
>
> Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.

- Author: [Hermann Hesse](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse.md)
- Book: [Demian](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse/demian.md)
- Page: 9
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_Hesse#Demian_(1919)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse/demian/novelists-when-they

## More from this book

> Translation: If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

p. 182 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse/demian/translation-if-you.md)

> Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself

p. 193 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse/demian/each-man-had.md)

> The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish — and it will.

p. 199 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse/demian/the-world-as.md)