16 Quotes by Irmgard Keun

That says a lot, if somebody pleases you – love is so much more that I’m thinking, perhaps it doesn’t exist at all.

And they would laugh at me. The dress was all sticking out around me and it was dark green with a pattern of animals with long tongues on it – and all the kids were laughing at me. And now I’m wearing a fur coat, and I’m in Berlin! And I would throw rocks at them and swear to myself that I would not be the kind that is laughed at, but that I would do the laughing.

There are bars with women wearing shirts with stiff necks and ties and they are terribly proud to be perverts, as if that weren’t something nobody can do anything about.

I continue to write because my hand wants something to do and my notebook with its white lined pages has a kind of readiness to receive my thoughts and my tiredness and to be a bed that my letters can lie in. That way at least part of me has a place to lie down.

I so want to give him my notebook – I want to be a real person – he should read my book – I work for him, I cook for him, I’m Doris – Doris isn’t just some piece of dirt. I don’t want to be innocent, I want to be the real Doris here and not that silly civilized product of the Green Moss’s imagination.

And sometimes somebody is laughing – and that laugh is stuffing all of yesterday’s and today’s anger back into the mouth that it’s oozing from.

They have courses teaching you foreign languages and ballroom dancing and etiquette and cooking. But there are no classes to learn how to be by yourself in a furnished room with chipped dishes, or how to be alone in general without any words of concern or familiar sounds.