Words matter. These are the best Herta Muller Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don’t often receive invitations.
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.
Happiness may perhaps be shared. But not luck, sadly.
Ceausescu was mad, and he made half of Romania mad. I’m mad because of him.
If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.
Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it’s finished.
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.
One is either destroyed by adapting or for refusing to.
Suffering doesn’t improve human beings, does it?
My mother tongue is German.
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.
I am a broken person.
As a child, I perceived my mother as an old woman.
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.
Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language.
I write in order to bear witness to life.
I never wanted to be a writer.
Working with language requires beauty for me.
Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.
I learned Romanian very late, when I was fifteen, in town, and I wanted to learn it. I like the language very much.
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.
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.
Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.
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.
Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery.
