8 Quotes by Wolfgang Hilbig

Oh, how I've envied the lives of those who could spend life sitting down. A place to sit, a place to sit! I'd lament, circling my empty chair.

And I rushed outside to memorize a tree ... for all time, if I can, I want to have it present, for at least one of all the stories that remain to be told, for a tree-lined lane down which I want to wander darkly someday, in one paragraph at least amid the maze of writing may the word 'tree' one day resound! Yet the dusk was falling, and my eyes, which were weary and which I didn't trust, could no longer make out the precise ... the true nature of a tree.

What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.

What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. And people who prefer misfortune out here to misfortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.

Even I was increasingly unclear about where I'd been, and which time I'd been in: so I had to explain myself to myself! It was for myself that I needed a justification ... but these would no longer have been stories describing the life of The People I lived among ... they were no longer legal stories. They were stories of the refuse, the refusal of this People! They were cast-aside stories, found only in the troubling places outside town.

Normality was normal because it had lost its stories ... only when the mask of normality was torn off did reasons for stories exist once again.

Lacking actual stories, as often as I could I've let this plight stand in for the missing material. Now the whole thing has so exhausted me that in all seriousness I'd need a new biography in order to wriggle out from the rough drafts of my non-authorship. For these drafts have become the only ground on which I can still move.

I've watched these waves of writing rush back and forth, though Waller, along the lines of the paper, like thoughts that wrote and instantly erased themselves. And in the lower margins, forgetfulness seemed to toss the fleeting eddy of its signature upon the empty pages.