Jenny Erpenbeck Quotes

#1. Which means that in the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.

Jenny Erpenbeck

#2. It would be lovely if he and his wife would succeed in dying before the matter of inherited property was finally settled. Then the person giving the speech at the funeral would be able to say that until the very end they had been able to pursue what they loved: sailing. [p. 121]

Jenny Erpenbeck

#3. ... when he slipped out of his mother's womb, he was already filled with interior spaces that didn't belong to him, and he can't just look inside to inspect his own interior.

Jenny Erpenbeck

#4. Every single moment of this afternoon is too late for her to leave again

Jenny Erpenbeck

#5. A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing.

Jenny Erpenbeck

#6. Sometimes the price one pays for something continues to grow after the fact,becoming too expensive long after it has been paid.

Jenny Erpenbeck

#7. How much better it would be, she thinks, if the world were ruled by chance and not a God.

Jenny Erpenbeck

#8. The end of a day on which a life has ended is still far from being the end of days.

Jenny Erpenbeck

#9. My fear of the future, she says, has not yet failed.

Jenny Erpenbeck

#10. Everything had kept getting less, they'd had to leave behind more and more baggage, or else it was taken from them, as though they were now too weak to carry all those things that are part of life, as though someone were trying to force them into old age by relieving them of all this.

Jenny Erpenbeck

#11. Adventure is really always just subjecting yourself to something unfamiliar

Jenny Erpenbeck