129 Quotes by Bernhard Schlink

What I really like about law is that it's not an endless discourse like history or philosophy. In law, there comes a point where problems have to be solved, and cases decided.

As an author, you hope for a director and a cast that will make something wonderful out of your book.

I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers.

Or is there no such thing as 'too late'? Is there only 'late' and is 'late' always better than 'never'? I don't know.

I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.

...I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible. ...And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents.

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily..

But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive - a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breast and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body