Antonia Michaelis Quotes

But what does he want my heart for?" the little queen asked.
"He just wants to own it," replied the sea lion. "That is enough. He wants to look on its beauty and know that his hands alone can touch it.

Anna took his hand to gauge the swelling. 'Let's at least put something cold around it. Frozen peas work pretty well.'
'Do I have to eat them?'
'No, you just have to inject them into a vein,' Anna said.

It was a disaster ... It was the most wonderful thing in the world.

That was how she saw the storyteller for the last time - in an absolutely silent world, in a staircase. He'd hit his target.
When she fell into darkness, she knew that she would never see him again.
She'd love him to the very end.

The words that I will have to find for that explanation will be sharp and they will hurt, much worse than the thorns of roses.

Anna, he said for the fourth time, as if there was nothing more to say, now that she'd finally answered. Nothing but her name. As if he'd just called to make sure she existed.

They're the ones inside a soap bubble. Not me.

She didn't know if this excitement was fueled by her ambition to find out something that nobody else knew. Or by the anticipation of finding out.

The place in her, though, where her tears should have come from, was rough and dry. No, she didn't find any tears in herself to cry for the storyteller.
The storyteller didn't exist anymore.

I can't be forgiven so I am not asking you for forgiveness. We lost each other, and we will never find each other again.

Anna watched as Abel walked across the empty schoolyard, she wondered whether there was a limit to desolation or whether it grew endlessly, infinitely. Desolation with a hundred faces and more, desolation of a hundred different kinds and more, like the color blue.

He looked at the gun. "Aren't you afraid?"
"Of course I am," Anna said. "Of course I'm afraid. But that doesn't help."
He shook his head. "No," he said, "it doesn't help to be afraid. Bad things happen anyway. You're right.

Sometimes I don't even know if I'm extremely happy or extremely sad. It happens a lot when I think of you

The white noise from the old Walkman enveloped them both; like a blanket of new snow, it draped itself over them, shutting out all the curious looks.
And the world under the blanket was - surprisingly, wonderfully - absolutely, quiet.

I'm doing a thousand new things in spite of myself," he said. "It's not easy, you know, to jump over your shadow.

I am not staying with the murderer," she said, her words muffled by his jacket. "I am not staying with the victim Abel Tannatek or the culprit Abel Tannatek. I am staying with the storyteller.

Adults were always quick to tell her how much she looked like her mother, and how little like her father. Though Anna thought that on the inside she was much more like him. There was this strong, unbreakable will in her to fight for something, somwhere. But where? for what? and against whom?

If we lose each other, we'll meet where it's spring.

Abel was brushing the snow off his parka while Micha was dancing around him, still balancing the plate of cookies, singing, 'We're staying, we're staying, we're staying overnight! We're drying! We're drying! We're drying on the line!

A story isn't a good one unless it has a good listener

Dance me through th curtains that our kisses have out worm.
Raise a ent of shelter now, though every thread is torn.
Dance me to the end of love.
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin.

I don't know what happened between the two of you. I don't know if it can be forgiven. The hardest thing always is to forgive yourself.

There was the place where all the shouted words fall into the water. They're too weak to make it from shore to shore. I saw the words underwater, millions of them; they're lying there on the bottom of the sea, a whole load of wrecked sentences, sentences that never reached their destination, questions from one side and answers from the other ...

Everybody knew everything now. Or did everybody know nothing? Nobody knew anything ... Nobody could know everything.

In a dream, in a fairytale, nothing has to be explained, everything happens of its own accord.

Nothing was perfect, but everything was all right. The light was never just blue.

In love, there is no criticism. In love, there is no rationality

You can't change things. That's life. Poor stays poor, rich says rich, and those two, they will never meet.

And she imagined how things could be later. It was stupid, but the picture just appeared in her mind. Abel and Magnus shoveling snow together ... in twenty years, in thirty. Magnus had grown old, his broad back still strong but bent from time, his hair nearly white at the temples. And Abel ... Abel was a different Abel, an adult one, one who was absolutely self-confident and didn't let his eyes dart around the room at lunch, as if he were caught in trap.
"Nonsense," she whispered. "Thirty years? You don't stay with the person you meet at seventeen ... what kind of fairy tale are you living in, Anna Leemann?"
And still the picture seemed right.

As long as you're better at it than skating ... , Anna said and stood up too. She wanted to say more, but that wasn't possible because he was kissing her. Reasonable Anna wanted to draw back the danger of touch. But unreasonable Anna welcomed the kiss like happiness. Maybe, she thought, it's better to take these moments when you get them - there might not be too many in life.