Christa Wolf Quotes

#1. Between killing and dying there's a third way: live

Christa Wolf

#2. I did not like the thing in me which he had been able to seduce.

Christa Wolf

#3. There are secrets that ravage you, others that make you stronger.

Christa Wolf

#4. The past is not dead - it isn't even past

Christa Wolf

#5. I've known one thing for a long time: there's a role in the big machine even for someone who makes fun of it.

Christa Wolf

#6. What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers.

Christa Wolf

#7. I claim that every woman in this century and in our culture sphere who has ventured into male-dominated institutions - 'literature' and 'aesthetics' are such institutions - must have experienced the desire for self-destruction.

Christa Wolf

#8. It's really ridiculous to assume that people are improved by hearing someone tell the truth about them.

Christa Wolf

#9. The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?

Christa Wolf

#10. Coldness in everything. It comes from a long way off; it gets into everything. One must get out of the way before it reaches the core. If it does that, one won't feel even the coldness any more. Do you see what I mean?

Christa Wolf

#11. Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness.

Christa Wolf

#12. He talked about the party line the way Catholics talk about the Immaculate Conception

Christa Wolf

#13. Much later I realized that a person's attitude to pain reveals more about his future than almost any other sign I know.

Christa Wolf

#14. Autonomous people, nations, and systems can promote each other's welfare; they do not have to fight each other like those whose inner insecurity and immaturity continually demand the demarcation of limits and postures of intimidation.

Christa Wolf

#15. The most beautiful thing under the sun is being under the sun.

Christa Wolf

#16. It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing - it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human race is based on.

Christa Wolf

#17. Every system of power in the world has a vested interest in weakening the individuality of its subjects and tries to weaken or it possible completely extinguish it.

Christa Wolf

#18. I asked Agamemnon plainly about Iphigenia; he wept. Not as one cries out of pain, but out of fear. Out of weakness.

Christa Wolf

#19. The happy times of pristine thinking and open minds, always favorable for beginnings, belonged now to the past, and we knew it.

Christa Wolf

#20. A possession considered of little value up to now suddenly becomes precious to a person if another person desires it, don't you think?

Christa Wolf

#21. When we stop hoping, that which we fear will certainly come.

Christa Wolf

#22. Writing means making things large.

Christa Wolf

#23. I often wonder if the bill is yet to be presented during our lifetime. If not, I must present it to myself.

Christa Wolf