Herta Müller Quotes

Inside the camp the we-form is singular.

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.

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

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

The world is not a costume ball,

No novels, since you just read them once and never again.

There (Kaschau) the mountains stare down through our heads until we die.

The war was still on in January 1945. In their dismay at my being shipped off in the dead of winter to who knows where in Russia, everyone wanted to give me something that might be of use, even if it couldn't be help. Because nothing in the world could possible help.

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.

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

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.