Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herta Muller Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 66 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Herta Muller.

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Famous Quotes By Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 2223859

Tereza's death hurt me so much, it was as if I had two heads smashing into each other. One was full of mown love, the other of hate. I wanted the love to grow back. It grew like grass and straw, all mixed up together, and turned into an icy affirmation on my brow. That was my damn stupid plant. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 807998

Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off when you stop growing, because childhood is all gone. And they grow back when you shrivel up, because love is all gone. Leaves spring up at will, writes Lola, just like tall grass. Two or three children in the village don't have any leaves, and those have a big childhood. A child like that is an only child, because it has a father and a mother who have been to school. The leaf-fleas turn older children into younger ones - a four-year-old into a three-year-old, a three-year-old into a one-year-old. Even a six-months-old, writes Lola, and even a newborn. And the more little brothers and sisters the leaf-fleas make, the smaller the childhood becomes. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 317838

No cities can grow in a dictatorship, because everything stays small when it's being watched. — Herta Muller

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Then you go on talking, about something you never actually mention. And your forehead and mouth are as far apart as they can be. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1684072

I've always had just enough sense to spare others, but never enough to save myself from misfortune. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 106169

My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn't be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 363585

Hunger is an object. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 839419

We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood, it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1401400

They have good streets here, but everything's so spread out. I am not used to asphalt, it makes my feet hurt, and my brain. I get as tired here in a day as I do back home in a year.
That's not home, other people live there now, I wrote to Mother. Home is where you are now ...
And Mother wrote back to me: How would you know where home is? The place where Toni the clockmaker tends the graves, that's home. — Herta Muller

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Sand can be any shade of yellow, from peroxide blond to canary, or even with a tinge of pink.
Yellow sand is tender. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 457435

Even judges' children hear something about the world, they go to the Black Sea like everyone in the country. They look out and feel the same urge to go somewhere, feel it tugging at them from head to toe. You don't have to be particularly bad off to think: This can't be a the life I get. The judges' children know as well as Lilli and me that the same sky that looks down on the border guards stretches all the way to Italy or Canada, where things are better than here. One way or the other, the attempt will be made, whether sooner or later, in this way or that. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1889523

At that hour the moon is almost entirely eaten away; it doesn't know where to go after reaching the city. The sky has to loosen its grip on the earth as day begins to break. The streets run steeply up and down, and the streetcars travel back and forth like rooms ablaze with light. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1269883

Windisch hears a leaf on the stones in the hallway. It's scratching on the stones. The wall is long and white. Windisch closes his eyes. He feels the wall growing on his face. The lime burns his forehead. A stone in the lime opens its mouth. The apple tree trembles. Its leaves are ears. They listen. The apple tree drenches its green apples. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 653267

Before the war an apple tree had stood behind the church. It was an apple tree that ate its own apples. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 112209

When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 290244

In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations. — Herta Muller

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How do you have to live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think? — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 334418

If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 2263742

What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 158257

To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 169854

The balls were dry as wood, you had to lick and suck at them before they tasted like sour cherries. If you chewed them well, the pit felt very smooth and hot on the tongue. Those night cherries were a happy thing, but they only sharpened our hunger. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1424687

Occasionally a yellow leaf fell from the tree. Then one or the other of us would turn up his eyes as though to see the leaf fall once again. We didn't wait for the next leaf, which fell a little later. Out eyes lacked the patience. We didn't commit ourselves to leaves. Only to flying splashes of yellow that distracted our faces from one another's — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 331277

No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1450650

Daytime sleep is not deep black; it's shallow and yellow. Our sleep is restless, the sunlight falls on our pillows. But it does make the day a little shorter. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1454098

In writing, one searches, and that is what keeps one writing, that one sees and experiences things from another angle entirely; one experiences oneself during the process of writing. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1541893

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1599228

I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 254158

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 226312

The guards eat out in the open, I said. They don't swallow their deaths because the passerby know the sound of the snapping twigs and the sour belch of poverty. — Herta Muller

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In the trinity of skin, bones, and brown water, men and women lose all difference. — Herta Muller

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Every shift is a work of art. — Herta Muller

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The more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become. If our mouth is banned, then we attempt to assert ourselves through gestures, even objects. They are more difficult to interpret, and take time before they arouse suspicion. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 212631

I do a lot of counting. Cigarette butts, trees, fence slats, clouds, or the number of paving stones between one phone pole and the next, the windows along the way to the bus stop in the morning, the pedestrians I see from the bus between one stop and the next, red ties on an afternoon in the city. How many steps from the office to the factory gate. I count to keep the world in order, I said. Paul — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1932210

What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1964422

He's looking into the night, in case a shadow comes to listen and look. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1977720

I was all wrapped up, the streetlamps and lighted windows were glittering, the frost bit into our faces, our lips felt like frozen crusts of bread, our cheeks as smooth and cold as porcelain. Sky and street were nothing but snow, we were driving into a great big snowball. — Herta Muller

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Who can take a single step with his head? — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 2054214

The gym instructor was the first to raise his hand. All the other hands flew up after his. While raising their hands, everybody looked at the raised hands of the others. If someone's own hand wasn't as high as the others', he would stretch his arms a little farther. People kept their hands up until their fingers grew tired and started to droop and their elbows began to feel heavy and pull downward. Everyone looked around, and since no one else's arm was lowered, they straightened their fingers again and extended their elbows. Sweat stains showed under the arms; shirts and blouses came untucked. Necks were stretched, ears turned red, lips parted and stayed half-open. Heads kept still, while eyes slid from side to side. — Herta Muller

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Women always need other women to lean on. They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become. — Herta Muller

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The soldiers lie in the grey morning. Thickets separate them. They are on manoeuvres. They are at war with their hands, their eyes, their foreheads. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 2174418

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 163970

Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together? — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 2233567

At a time I used to think that in a world without guards people would walk differently from the way we do in our country. Where people are allowed to think and write differently, I thought, they will also walk differently. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 951556

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 690442

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it? — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 711290

The cabbage white flies through the tailor's cheek. The tailor sinks his head. The cabbage white flies out of the back of the tailor's head, white and uncrumpled. Skinny Wilma flaps her handkerchief. The cabbage white flies through her forehead and into her head. — Herta Muller

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In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 548072

Windisch closes his eyes. He feels his eyes. He feels his eyeballs in his hands. His eyes without a face. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 814178

Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 816427

The tin-sheep and wooden-melon proletariat produced their papers and named their places of work. The madman with the white beard plucked at the sleeve of the policemen, opened up his folded handkerchief, and said: professor of philosophy. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 838840

Today the grass listens when I speak of love. It seems to me that this word isn't honest even with itself. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 546320

Jesus sleeps on the cross by the church door. When he wakes up, he'll be old. The air in the village will be brighter than his naked skin. — Herta Muller

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Better to be at home in room and garden with ugly people than belong to strangers. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 911420

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it's no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 912458

Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 679291

All of that pile on you so that, sooner or later, you cannot bear it anymore. And in that situation I started to write, because there was no other ways for me to express, except through the vicious cycle of words. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 964084

The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat - coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that's caught a cold. — Herta Muller

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Silence is also a form of speaking. — Herta Muller

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Hey, not while I'm at my devotions, no so fast, the fat man said, inside the shithouse you're communing with God, and outside you find that all hell's broken loose. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1076104

I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1083229

I wanted love to grow back, like the grass when it's mown down. To grow differently, if need be, like children's teeth, like hair, like fingernails. To spring up at will, wild and untended. The chill of the sheets made me shudder, and so did the warmth that followed when I lay down. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 1210844

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently. — Herta Muller

Herta Muller Quotes 533635

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country. — Herta Muller

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Hunger is not an object. — Herta Muller

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The summer is cruel to its leaves, the fall to its colors, the winter to us. — Herta Muller

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I never wanted to be a writer. — Herta Muller