Christa Wolf Quotes & Sayings

I often wonder if the bill is yet to be presented during our lifetime. If not, I must present it to myself. — Christa Wolf

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering. — Christa Wolf

The most beautiful thing under the sun is being under the sun. — Christa Wolf

The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints? — Christa Wolf

It's really ridiculous to assume that people are improved by hearing someone tell the truth about them. — Christa Wolf

Coldness in everything. It comes from a long way off; it gets into everything. One must get out of the way before it reaches the core. If it does that, one won't feel even the coldness any more. Do you see what I mean? — Christa Wolf

Every system of power in the world has a vested interest in weakening the individuality of its subjects and tries to weaken or it possible completely extinguish it. — Christa Wolf

It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing - it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human race is based on. — Christa Wolf

I did not like the thing in me which he had been able to seduce. — Christa Wolf

Autonomous people, nations, and systems can promote each other's welfare; they do not have to fight each other like those whose inner insecurity and immaturity continually demand the demarcation of limits and postures of intimidation. — Christa Wolf

I asked Agamemnon plainly about Iphigenia; he wept. Not as one cries out of pain, but out of fear. Out of weakness. — Christa Wolf

Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness. — Christa Wolf

What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers. — Christa Wolf

To prevent wars, people must criticize, in their own country, the abuses that occur in their own country. The role taboos play in the preparation for war. The number of shameful secrets keeps growing incessantly, boundlessly. How meaningless all censorship taboos become, and how meaningless the consequences for overstepping them, when your life is in danger. — Christa Wolf

I claim that every woman in this century and in our culture sphere who has ventured into male-dominated institutions - 'literature' and 'aesthetics' are such institutions - must have experienced the desire for self-destruction. — Christa Wolf

The happy times of pristine thinking and open minds, always favorable for beginnings, belonged now to the past, and we knew it. — Christa Wolf

When we stop hoping, that which we fear will certainly come. — Christa Wolf

Much later I realized that a person's attitude to pain reveals more about his future than almost any other sign I know. — Christa Wolf

There are secrets that ravage you, others that make you stronger. — Christa Wolf

You love tenderly and warmly, but your love is like friendship. That's why you have good friends, you're sociable, sympathetic toward people. Until this dissatisfaction comes over you-you know what I'm talking about. Then you become moody, can even repulse people who are close to you, even people who love you, you know why. Those are bad times when everything goes cold, and they follow the times of great love ... — Christa Wolf

What do I actually mean when I say 'delusion'? I mean the absurdity of the claim that the excessive atomic armament of both sides creates a 'balance of terror' that reduces the danger of war; that in the long run it even offers a minimum of security ... Hence the cynical saying: He who strikes first will die second. — Christa Wolf

A possession considered of little value up to now suddenly becomes precious to a person if another person desires it, don't you think? — Christa Wolf

Writing means making things large. — Christa Wolf

Between killing and dying there's a third way: live — Christa Wolf

I've known one thing for a long time: there's a role in the big machine even for someone who makes fun of it. — Christa Wolf

He talked about the party line the way Catholics talk about the Immaculate Conception — Christa Wolf

The past is not dead - it isn't even past — Christa Wolf