Quotes from Herta Muller

Now I was someone else. We knew each other in a way we no longer were and never would be again. Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you're so impossibly close is unbearable.

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.

Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don't expect from them.

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.

Ich wusste nicht, wie das Licht verschwindet, obwohl ich eine ganze Stunde hinsah. Er sagte, es gäbe Sachen, die eben nicht in die Augen gehen.

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

Nothing had anything to do with me. I was locked up inside myself and evicted from myself. I didn't belong to them and I was missing me.

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

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

Who can take a single step with his head?

Ich trage stilles Gepäck. Ich habe mich so tief und so lang ins Schweigen gepackt, ich kann mich in Worten nie auspacken. Ich packe mich nur anders ein, wenn ich rede.

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.

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.

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

Das Kind redet weiter. Beim Reden bleibt etwas auf der Zunge liegen. Das Kind denkt sich, es kann nur die Wahrheit sein, die sich auf die Zunge liegt wie ein Kirschkern, der nicht in den Hals fallen will. Solange die Stimme beim Reden ins Ohr steigt, wartet sie auf die Wahrheit. Aber gleich nach dem Schweigen, denkt sich das Kind, ist alles gelogen, weil die Wahrheit in den Hals gefallen ist.

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

A noi si addice la paura della tenerezza

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.

The hunger angel looks at me from the sky and says: Ride back. I say: But then I'll die. If you die, I'll make everything orange, and it won't hurt, he says. And I ride back, and he keeps his word. As I die, the sky over every watchtower turns orange, and it doesn't hurt.

And I'm different without you. You're the only one who thinks you're never different.

Cement is as impossible to escape as the dust of the earth, you can't tell where it comes from because it's already there. And apart from hunger, the only thing in our minds that's as quick as cement is homesickness. It steals from you the same way cement does, and you can drown in it as well.

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

Monstrous tenderness gets tangled in guilt differently from intentional cruelty. More deeply. And for longer.

Jak trzeba by ?y?, my?la?am, ?eby pasowa? do tego co si? akurat my?li.