Quotes from Herta Muller

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.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside the story. Only if the sentences 'sparkle' can I get hooked.

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.

Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Silence is also a form of speaking.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Heute geht es mir besser, ich bin fast ein Mensch.

Little treasures have a sign that says, Here I am. Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember. But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying, I was there.