There's no more fury, no more passion you can't feel happiness or sadness anymore you forget how to laugh and how to cry. You become indifferent, gray, and the whole world begins to feel foreign and strange. Then, after a while, even that feeling goes away, and you don't feel anything at all. You feel sadder and more morose, emptier inside, and increasingly unhappy with yourself and with the world in general. But this disinterest doesn't just disappear after a while - no, it gets worse from day-to-day, from week to week. Nothing interests you anymore, and you begin to waste away. In the beginning you don't notice much, but then, all of a sudden, you're not in the mood to do anything at all. 'Momo stared at Master HOra in bewilderness, and then quietly asked, 'what kind of sickness is it?' It's perfectly clear! Admit it, Beppo!'īut beppo only shook his head slowly. But I'm positive that it's precisely the other way around, that anyone who knows their secret is invincible and can't be harmed by them. 'he thinks,' Gigi explained with a smile, 'that the gray men consider anyone who knows their secret to be a danger to them, and that they'll stalk anyone who does. 'why didn't Beppo want Momo to tell us what happened?' Asked Franco. 'Who's brave enough to take a stand against these gray men with us?' 'Well'? Asked Gigi, breaking the silence. A younger sibling began to cry loudly but was quickly comforted. They hadn't pictured the time thieves as so sinister. ' 'ĭuring Momo's account everyone had become more than a bit anxious. We hunger for it.Ah! You have no idea how valuable your time is! But we, we know, and we suck it away from you. All the time that they save is actually lost to them.

exhausting work, stealing people's Time - hours, minutes, and seconds. we can only do our work as long as no one knows who we are. No one can know that we exist and what we do. If there were more of your kind, we would just have to close our bank and dissolve into thin Air. Then in an even grayer voice, he answered: 'I must say, I have never encountered anyone quite like you, not once, and I know many, many people. The Gray Man began to rise, and quite suddenly, he sank into himself a little. ' 'doesn't anybody love you?' She asked in a whisper. In fact, the whole city is taken over by them. She brings out the best in people, because she knows how to really listen to them.Īll of her friends are taken over little by little by the gray men, an analogy for the predator class.

She doesn't belong to anybody, and makes her home in the ruins of an amphitheater. Momo is a little girl who lives in a city in Italy, unspecified time.

Momo by Michael Ende