Top 52 Herta Muller Quotes
#1. The cabbage white flies through the tailor's cheek. The tailor sinks his head. The cabbage white flies out of the back of the tailor's head, white and uncrumpled. Skinny Wilma flaps her handkerchief. The cabbage white flies through her forehead and into her head.
Herta Muller
#2. Better to be at home in room and garden with ugly people than belong to strangers.
Herta Muller
#3. The guards eat out in the open, I said. They don't swallow their deaths because the passerby know the sound of the snapping twigs and the sour belch of poverty.
Herta Muller
#4. The summer is cruel to its leaves, the fall to its colors, the winter to us.
Herta Muller
#5. 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.
Herta Muller
#6. What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.
Herta Muller
#8. Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.
Herta Muller
#9. Before the war an apple tree had stood behind the church. It was an apple tree that ate its own apples.
Herta Muller
#10. Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.
Herta Muller
#11. The tin-sheep and wooden-melon proletariat produced their papers and named their places of work. The madman with the white beard plucked at the sleeve of the policemen, opened up his folded handkerchief, and said: professor of philosophy.
Herta Muller
#14. 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.
Herta Muller
#15. Windisch closes his eyes. He feels his eyes. He feels his eyeballs in his hands. His eyes without a face.
Herta Muller
#16. Sand can be any shade of yellow, from peroxide blond to canary, or even with a tinge of pink.
Yellow sand is tender.
Herta Muller
#17. Jesus sleeps on the cross by the church door. When he wakes up, he'll be old. The air in the village will be brighter than his naked skin.
Herta Muller
#18. In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.
Herta Muller
#19. The more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become. If our mouth is banned, then we attempt to assert ourselves through gestures, even objects. They are more difficult to interpret, and take time before they arouse suspicion.
Herta Muller
#20. 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.
Herta Muller
#21. The soldiers lie in the grey morning. Thickets separate them. They are on manoeuvres. They are at war with their hands, their eyes, their foreheads.
Herta Muller
#23. How do you have to live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think?
Herta Muller
#24. Today the grass listens when I speak of love. It seems to me that this word isn't honest even with itself.
Herta Muller
#25. 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.
Herta Muller
#27. To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.
Herta Muller
#28. No cities can grow in a dictatorship, because everything stays small when it's being watched.
Herta Muller
#29. When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.
Herta Muller
#30. 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.
Herta Muller
#31. 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.
Herta Muller
#32. If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.
Herta Muller
#33. Then you go on talking, about something you never actually mention. And your forehead and mouth are as far apart as they can be.
Herta Muller
#35. Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?
Herta Muller
#36. 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.
Herta Muller
#37. 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.
Herta Muller
#38. I was all wrapped up, the streetlamps and lighted windows were glittering, the frost bit into our faces, our lips felt like frozen crusts of bread, our cheeks as smooth and cold as porcelain. Sky and street were nothing but snow, we were driving into a great big snowball.
Herta Muller
#39. The balls were dry as wood, you had to lick and suck at them before they tasted like sour cherries. If you chewed them well, the pit felt very smooth and hot on the tongue. Those night cherries were a happy thing, but they only sharpened our hunger.
Herta Muller
#40. 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.
Herta Muller
#41. 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.
Herta Muller
#42. Tereza's death hurt me so much, it was as if I had two heads smashing into each other. One was full of mown love, the other of hate. I wanted the love to grow back. It grew like grass and straw, all mixed up together, and turned into an icy affirmation on my brow. That was my damn stupid plant.
Herta Muller
#43. I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes.
Herta Muller
#44. If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.
Herta Muller
#45. In the trinity of skin, bones, and brown water, men and women lose all difference.
Herta Muller
#46. He's looking into the night, in case a shadow comes to listen and look.
Herta Muller
#47. I've always had just enough sense to spare others, but never enough to save myself from misfortune.
Herta Muller
#48. Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?
Herta Muller
#49. Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.
Herta Muller
#50. In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations.
Herta Muller
#51. Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity.
Herta Muller
#52. Hey, not while I'm at my devotions, no so fast, the fat man said, inside the shithouse you're communing with God, and outside you find that all hell's broken loose.
Herta Muller
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