100 Quotes by Herta Müller

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.

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

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

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

Who can take a single step with his head?

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.

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.

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