Herta Muller Quotations

In writing, one searches, and that is what keeps one writing, that one sees and experiences things from another angle entirely; one experiences oneself during the process of writing.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.

If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.

The more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become. If our mouth is banned, then we attempt to assert ourselves through gestures, even objects. They are more difficult to interpret, and take time before they arouse suspicion.

In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations.

My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn't be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands.

Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.

I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.

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.

Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity".

When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry.

I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes.

Who can take a single step with his head?

In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.

Women always need other women to lean on. They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become.

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand,

To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?