Herta Muller Quotes

What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

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.

In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.

To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.

Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?

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.

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.

In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations.

I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes.

If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

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.

I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.

What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry.

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.

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

Who can take a single step with his head?

My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn't be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands.

Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity".