31 Quotes by Ursula Hegi

The absence of doubt will turn humans into beasts.

We Germans have a history of sacrificing everything for one strong leader,” her father had said. “It’s our fear of chaos.

If I look closely, I can almost see myself floating in my mother’s palm. Yet, when I shut my eyes, I find a different image of my mother releasing me as we dance in the storm and twirl in separate circles that cause the water to ripple from us in widening rings which merge in one ebbing bracelet of waves where the borders of the quarry meet the water, far from the center where my mother and I continue to spin our bodies in the radiant sheen of lightning.

And what she wanted more than anything that moment was for all the differences between people to matter no more – differences in size and race and belief...

The risk her stories posed to others – and to herself – was more subtle. When she was younger, she had used secrets as if they were currency, but she’d found out how secrets could use her instead by becoming stronger than she. It happened whenever she couldn’t stay away from a secret – drawn to it the way Georg Weiler was drawn to the bottle – though she sensed it would be better for her not to know.

And yet, just because a story was a certain way didn’t mean it would always be like that: stories took their old shape with them and fused it with the new shape. She didn’t understand yet how all the tangles of their lives would sort themselves out in her story, but she supposed it would be like raking: not every bit of earth would be untangled at once.

But Seehund hurled his love at her, his entire body. It was a love she recognized – she’d felt it within herself but had never been able to demonstrate it with such abandon.

She fought him by reminding herself what her father had said to Emil Hesping – that they lived in a country where believing had taken the place of knowing.

With the stories of people she’d known since her childhood it was like that: one incident in their lives might come to an ending, but others would lead into new veins, and what was fascinating was to look at the whole of it and discern a pattern, a way of being, that had shaped those passages.