Quotes from Bernhard Schlink

I wanted to pose myself both tasks - understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both

Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I never can be.

I know that disavowal is an unusal form of betrayal. From the outside it is impossible to tell if you are disowning someone or simply exercising discretion, being considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what you're doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal.

The value of being brave, working hard, saving money keeping order depends on what it's for.

When an airplane's engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.

I wanted reality to drive out the clichés.

why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?

I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled fresh, freshly washed or of fresh laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved.

Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.

Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill?

The past has to be remembered, so that it's never repeated.

I knew none of it then - if indeed I know any of it now and am not just making patterns in the air.

Weil die Wahrheit dessen, was man redet, das ist, was man tut, kann man das Reden auch lassen.

She liked being alone, and she was alone a lot. When she met people, she often found them deeply strange, their behavior incomprehensible, their confidence unsettling.

Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides.

But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her.

I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers.

It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death.

Did my moral upbrining somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing- then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn't stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.

Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do.

We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have. I had to be content with that.

I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves.

Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?

You don't have the power to upset me. You don't matter enough to upset me.