Christa Wolf Quotes

The past is not dead - it isn't even past

You love tenderly and warmly, but your love is like friendship. That's why you have good friends, you're sociable, sympathetic toward people. Until this dissatisfaction comes over you-you know what I'm talking about. Then you become moody, can even repulse people who are close to you, even people who love you, you know why. Those are bad times when everything goes cold, and they follow the times of great love.

To prevent wars, people must criticize, in their own country, the abuses that occur in their own country. The role taboos play in the preparation for war. The number of shameful secrets keeps growing incessantly, boundlessly. How meaningless all censorship taboos become, and how meaningless the consequences for overstepping them, when your life is in danger.

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

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

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.

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

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

What do I actually mean when I say 'delusion'? I mean the absurdity of the claim that the excessive atomic armament of both sides creates a 'balance of terror' that reduces the danger of war; that in the long run it even offers a minimum of security. ... Hence the cynical saying: He who strikes first will die second.