# Quote — Hermann Hesse, Demian

> Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.

- Author: [Hermann Hesse](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse.md)
- Book: [Demian](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hermann-hesse/demian.md)
- Page: 149
- 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/now-everything-changed

## 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)