Top 49 Quotes & Sayings by Herta Muller

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.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

I speak a kind of Hapsburg language.

It was only against my mother's will that I attended the preparatory high school in the city. She wanted me to become a seamstress in the village. She knew that if I moved to the city, I would become corrupted. And I was. I started to read books.

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

My mother tongue is German.

I write in order to bear witness to life.

If I don't belong because of what I think and because of my opinions, then so be it. What can one do about it? One can't bend over backwards or pretend to be someone else just to belong. And in any case, it doesn't work. Once you no longer belong, it's over.

Happiness may perhaps be shared. But not luck, sadly.

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

As a child, I perceived my mother as an old woman.

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

For me, each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, have invariably been denied me.

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

I am a broken person.

I never wanted to be a writer.

If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside the story. Only if the sentences 'sparkle' can I get hooked.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-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.

I find any kind of 'organizing' very difficult. And that has irksome consequences when it comes to books, since I've often wound up buying books twice because I couldn't find what I already have in all my mess.

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?

One is either destroyed by adapting or for refusing to.

I learned Romanian very late, when I was fifteen, in town, and I wanted to learn it. I like the language very much.

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.

My first book, 'Nadirs,' was very important for me. I'll leave its literary worth for others to judge. But its publication in Berlin in 1984 gave me protection. As did the awards it won. The Romanian secret police could no longer treat me and my friends as though we were completely cut off from the rest of the world. And we no longer felt cut off.

I believe that literature always goes precisely there where the damage to a person has been done.

Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language.

Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery.

Ceausescu was mad, and he made half of Romania mad. I'm mad because of him.

We didn't have any books at home. Not even children's books or fairy tales. The only 'fantastic' stories came from religion class. And I took them all very literally, that God sees everything, and so I felt I was always being watched. Or that dead people were in Heaven right over our village.

Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.

You can't build a future if you don't have a past.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Who can take a single step with his head?

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

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.

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