“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.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“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.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“يالهُ من عبءٍ أن تكون غريباً ! لكن العبء الأكبر هو حينَ تكون القريب الغريب ، أن تتأرجح بين التقرّب والتغرّب.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“الغَطرسة مرحلة سابقة للسقوط . .”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“الكنوز الصغيرة هي تلك التي كتب عليها «هذا أنا هنا».الكنوز الكبيرة هي المكتوب عليها «أنت تعرف بالتأكيد»وأحلاها هي التي كتب عليها «كنتُ هنا»”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Boredom is fear's patience. Fear doesn't want to exaggerate. Only on occasion--and fear considers this very important--does it want to know how things stand with me.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Es ist gar keine Katze, sagte ich mir, nur die Verpelzung der graugestreiften Langeweile, die Geduld der Angst in einer schmalen Straße.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Nothing had anything to do with me. I was locked up inside myself and evicted from myself. I didn’t belong to them and I was missing me.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Little treasures have a sign that says, Here I am.
Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember.
But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying, I was there.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“And I’m different without you. You’re the only one who thinks you’re never different.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Todo lo que tengo lo llevo conmigo.
O: todo lo mío lo llevo conmigo.
He llevado todo lo que tenía. No era mío. Era o algo destinado a otras finalidades o de otra persona. […]
Llevo un equipaje de silencio. Me he rodeado de un silencio tan hondo y duradero que nunca acierto a abrirme con las palabras. Cuando hablo, solamente me cierro de otra manera.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don’t expect from them.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Everything that happens is always simple. And there’s a principle to how things proceed, assuming that they last.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“En el pasillo de madera, justo al lado del contador del gas, la abuela dijo: SÉ QUE VOLVERÁS. No retuve esa frase en la memoria deliberadamente. Me la llevé al campo de trabajo sin darme cuenta. No tenía ni idea de que me acompañaba. Pero una frase así es libre. Ella actuó en mi interior más que todos los libros que me llevé. SÉ QUE VOLVERÁS se convirtió en cómplice de la pala del corazón y en adversario del ángel del hambre. Yo, que he regresado, puedo decirlo: Una frase así te mantiene con vida.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Hunger is an object.
The angel has climbed into my brain.”
The angel doesn't think. He thinks straight.
He's never absent.
He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction.
He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me.
He knew all this before he met me, and he knows my future.
He lingers in every capillary like quicksilver. First a sweetness in my throat. Then pressure on my stomach and chest. The fear is too much.
Everything has become lighter.
The hunger angel leans to one side as he walks with open eyes. He staggers around in small circles and balances on my breath-swing. He knows the homesickness in the brain and the blind alleys in the air.
The air angel leans to the other side as he walks with open hunger.
H whispers to himself and to me: where there is loading there can also be unloading. He is of the same flesh that he is deceiving. Will have deceived.
He knows about saved bread and cheek-bread and he sends out the white hare.
He says he's coming back but stays where he is.
When he comes, he comes with force.
It's utterly clear:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
Hunger is an object.
“Now I was someone else. We knew each other in a way we no longer were and never would be again. Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you’re so impossibly close is unbearable.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“I wanted to work out a trade with things that aren’t alive but aren’t dead either. I wanted to make an emergency exchange, trading my body for the horizon line above and the dusty roads on the earth below. I wanted to borrow their endurance, exist without my body, and when the worst was over, slip back into my body and reappear in my fufaika. This had nothing to do with dying, quite the opposite.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“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.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“The hunger angel looks at me from the sky and says: Ride back.
I say: But then I’ll die.
If you die, I’ll make everything orange, and it won’t hurt, he says.
And I ride back, and he keeps his word. As I die, the sky over every watchtower turns orange, and it doesn’t hurt.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Cement is as impossible to escape as the dust of the earth, you can’t tell where it comes from because it’s already there. And apart from hunger, the only thing in our minds that’s as quick as cement is homesickness. It steals from you the same way cement does, and you can drown in it as well.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the contempt. You get used to contempt. After a while the commands just sound like a constant clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus. Trudi Pelikan said: Russian is a language that's caught a cold.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Sand can be any shade of yellow, from peroxide blond to canary, or even with a tinge of pink.
Yellow sand is tender.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“In the trinity of skin, bones, and brown water, men and women lose all difference.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Every shift is a work of art.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“The balls were dry as wood, you had to lick and suck at them before they tasted like sour cherries. If you chewed them well, the pit felt very smooth and hot on the tongue. Those night cherries were a happy thing, but they only sharpened our hunger.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“Everyone eats his words by himself although we’re all eating together. There’s no thought for the hunger of others, you can’t hunger together. Cabbage soup was our main food, but it mainly took the meat from our bones and the sanity from our minds. The hunger angel ran around in hysterics. He lost all proportion, growing more in a single day than grass in an entire summer or snow in an entire winter.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
Herta Müller
Born place: in Niţchidorf, Romania
Born date August 17, 1953
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“People who read books," he went on, "tend to be dispensable. Extremely.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, quote from The Unit
“I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from A Year in the Merde
“From what I have seen of the world, Reverend, motherhood is a certainty, but fatherhood is a subject of debate.”
― Michael Crummey, quote from Galore
“Unlike white commentators, who were hamstrung by the fear that they would be labeled racist, I could voice my criticisms of the feudal, religious, and repressive mechanisms that were holding back women from Muslim communities.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, quote from Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
“Before drawing any affirmative conclusions let us first note the absence of the concept of imitation as a general pastoral or moral guideline. There is in the New Testament no Franciscan glorification of barefoot itinerancy. Even when Paul argues the case for celibacy, it does not occur to him to appeal to the example of Jesus. Even when Paul explains his own predilection for self-support there is no appeal to Jesus' years of village artisan. Even when the Apostle argues strongly the case for his teaching authority, there is no appeal to the rabbinic ministry of Jesus. Jesus' trade as a carpenter, his association with fishermen, and his choice of illustrations from the life of the sower and the shepherd have through Christian history given momentum to the romantic glorification of the handcrafts and the rural life; but there is none of this in the New Testament, which testifies throughout to the life and mission of a church going intentionally into the cities in full knowledge of the conflicts which awaited here there. That the concept of imitation is not applied by the New Testament at some of those points where Franciscan and romantic devotion has tried most piously to apply it, is all the more demonstration of how fundamental the thought of participation in the suffering of Christ is when the New Testament church sees it as guiding and explaining her attitude to the powers of the world. Only at one point, only on one subject - but then consistently, universally - is Jesus our example: in his cross.”
― John Howard Yoder, quote from The Politics of Jesus
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