Herta Müller Quotes

The world is not a costume ball,

If you don't have the right things, you improvise. the wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn out to be the only right things, simply because they're what you have.

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

Half starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects.

Hunger is not a bunker or a bed frame, otherwise it could be measured. Hunger is not an object.

Riding somewhere was always a happy thing. First of all: as long as you're moving, you haven't arrived. As long as you haven't arrived, you don't have to work. Riding in truck gives you time to recover. Second: when you ride, you come to some place that couldn't care less about you. you can't be yelled at or beaten by a tree. Under a tree, yes but the tree can't help that.

Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you're so impossibly close is unbearable.

You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you’ve even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. For here to there it’s all just the farty sputter of lantern. And they call that having lived. It’s not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.

Perhaps we had to stand so long as to stop the time in motion. Our bones became heavy as iron. When the flesh on your body disappears,your bones become a burden, and the ground pulls you down.

Welt, Welt, Schwester Welt

The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse.

I simply wanted to go to a place that didn't know who I was.

There’s an unspoken law that you should never start to cry if you have too many reasons to do so.

You can't rearrange freshly fallen snow, you can't fix snow so it looks untouched. You can rework earth, and sand and even grass if you try hard enough. Water takes care of itself, because it swallows everything and flows back together once it's done swallowing. And air is always in place because you can't see it. Everything but snow would have kept quiet.

The time for eating otrach orach is over. But not the hunger, which is always greater than we are.