Top 58 Bernhard Schlink Quotes
#1. I've written things about that, about how life's really big decisions aren't right or wrong, it's just that one lives different lives. No, I don't think your life went wrong.
Bernhard Schlink
#2. The past has to be remembered, so that it's never repeated.
Bernhard Schlink
#3. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?
Bernhard Schlink
#4. Why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?
Bernhard Schlink
#5. In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled freshed, freshly washed or of freshed laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved
Bernhard Schlink
#6. She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn't do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.
Bernhard Schlink
#7. What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?
Bernhard Schlink
#8. When she had fallen asleep on me, and the saw in the yard was quiet, and a blackbird was singing as the colors of things in the kitchen dimmed until nothing remained of them but lighter and darker shades of gray, I was completely happy.
Bernhard Schlink
#9. 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.
Bernhard Schlink
#10. 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.
Bernhard Schlink
#11. People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy. But they aren't and it is one of the experiences of life.
Bernhard Schlink
#12. I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account.
Bernhard Schlink
#13. I can't say I'm thankful about being German because I sometimes experience it as a huge burden. But it is an integral part of me and I wouldn't want to escape it. I have accepted it.
Bernhard Schlink
#14. When an airplane's engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.
Bernhard Schlink
#15. But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive - a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breast and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body
Bernhard Schlink
#16. In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched; I saw myself functioning at the university, with my parents and brother and sister and my friends, but inwardly I felt no involvement.
Bernhard Schlink
#17. As I looked and looked, the living face became visible in the dead, the young in the old. This is what must happen to old married couples, I thought: the young man is preserved in the old one for her, the beauty and grace of the young woman stay fresh in the old one for him.
Bernhard Schlink
#18. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.
Bernhard Schlink
#19. When we open ourselves
you yourself to me and I myself to you,
when we submerge
you into me and I into you
when we vanish
into me you and into you I
Then
am I me
and you are you.
Bernhard Schlink
#20. You don't have the power to upset me. You don't matter enough to upset me.
Bernhard Schlink
#21. Berg, Sophia may be a Greek name, but that is no reason for you to study your neighbor in a Greek lesson. Translate!
Bernhard Schlink
#22. The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.
Bernhard Schlink
#23. So I was still guilty. And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal.
Bernhard Schlink
#24. Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?
Bernhard Schlink
#25. Now to escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere.
Bernhard Schlink
#26. There's this old saying that, if you aren't particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don't want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don't know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I've never regretted it.
Bernhard Schlink
#27. It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?
Bernhard Schlink
#28. I certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that.
Bernhard Schlink
#30. Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.
Bernhard Schlink
#31. Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.
Bernhard Schlink
#32. We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst.
Bernhard Schlink
#34. I knew none of it then - if indeed I know any of it now and am not just making patterns in the air.
Bernhard Schlink
#35. To me it was obvious that experimental literature was experimenting on the reader, and Hanna didn't need that and neither did I.
Bernhard Schlink
#36. Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily..
Bernhard Schlink
#37. We make our own truths and lies ... Truths are often lies and lies truths ...
Bernhard Schlink
#38. As a citizen and someone who was a judge on the constitutional law court for 18 years, I feel whenever I can raise my voice with the hope of being heard I need to do it, but I wouldn't assign a special wisdom and responsibility to writers.
Bernhard Schlink
#39. I wanted to pose myself both tasks - understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both
Bernhard Schlink
#40. 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?
Bernhard Schlink
#41. As an author, you can't expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that's what you hope for, you shouldn't sell the rights.
Bernhard Schlink
#42. The value of being brave, working hard, saving money keeping order depends on what it's for.
Bernhard Schlink
#43. 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.
Bernhard Schlink
#44. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.
Bernhard Schlink
#45. I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.
Bernhard Schlink
#46. Which animal do you see when you hold me and close your eyes and think of animals?
Bernhard Schlink
#47. I love writing, and I am never as happy as when I have a week, a month - three months - with nothing to do but write.
Bernhard Schlink
#48. As an author, you hope for a director and a cast that will make something wonderful out of your book.
Bernhard Schlink
#49. It was more dangerous not to go; I was running the risk of becoming trapped in my own fantasies. So I was doing the right thing by going. She would behave normally, I would behave normally, and everything would be normal again.
Bernhard Schlink
#51. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.
Bernhard Schlink
#52. When did you know you were going to be a writer?
I knew it when I was young, I forgot it in my 30ties, then I remembered it again.
Bernhard Schlink
#53. I know that I found it beautiful. But I cannot recapture it's beauty.
Bernhard Schlink
#54. 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.
Bernhard Schlink
#55. What I really like about law is that it's not an endless discourse like history or philosophy. In law, there comes a point where problems have to be solved, and cases decided.
Bernhard Schlink
#56. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self-righteousness?
Bernhard Schlink
#57. Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I never can be.
Bernhard Schlink
#58. There's no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.
Bernhard Schlink
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