Bernhard Schlink Quotes

I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers. ~ Bernhard Schlink

In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled freshed, freshly washed or of freshed laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved ~ Bernhard Schlink

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law? ~ Bernhard Schlink

The value of being brave, working hard, saving money keeping order depends on what it's for. ~ Bernhard Schlink

But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self-righteousness? ~ Bernhard Schlink

Philosophy has forgotten about children ~ Bernhard Schlink

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you? ~ Bernhard Schlink

Waking from a bad dream does not necessarily console you. It can also make you fully aware of the horror you just dreamed, and even of the truth residing in that horror.
"الاستيقاظ من حلم سيئ لا يعني بالضرورة أنك استرحت منه , بل يجعلك فقط تعي جيداً فظاعة ما حلمت به, والحقيقة المرعبة التي لقيتها في الحلم. ~ Bernhard Schlink

But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive - a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breast and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body ~ Bernhard Schlink

Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I've written things about that, about how life's really big decisions aren't right or wrong, it's just that one lives different lives. No, I don't think your life went wrong. ~ Bernhard Schlink

But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept? ~ Bernhard Schlink

I'm not frightened. I'm not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love. ~ Bernhard Schlink

To me it was obvious that experimental literature was experimenting on the reader, and Hanna didn't need that and neither did I. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Goethe's poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Which animal do you see when you hold me and close your eyes and think of animals? ~ Bernhard Schlink

Why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? ~ Bernhard Schlink

What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose? ~ Bernhard Schlink

If something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back to me, and when I feel guilty, the feelings of guilt return; if I yearn for something today, or feel homesick, I feel the yearnings and homesickness from back then. The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. ~ Bernhard Schlink

It was like being a prisoner on death row who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objective eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness tha he brings to the murders and deaths themselves. All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life's functions are reduced to minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators , too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenary, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves. ~ Bernhard Schlink

We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have. I had to be content with that. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I wanted to pose myself both tasks - understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both ~ Bernhard Schlink

There's this old saying that, if you aren't particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don't want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don't know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I've never regretted it. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I reread the Odyssey at that time, which I had first read in school and remembered as a story of a homecoming.But it is not a story of a homecoming. How could the Greeks who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I thought that if the right time gets missed, if one has refused or been refused something for too long, it's too late, even if it is finally tackled with energy and received with joy. Or is there no such thing as "too late"? Is there only "late," and is "late" always better than "never"? I don't know. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Since our nights together on that trip, I had longed every night to feel her next to me, to curl up against her, my stomach against her behind and my chest against her back, to rest my hand on her breasts, to reach out for her when I woke up in the night, find her, push my leg over her legs, and press my face against her shoulder. ~ Bernhard Schlink

People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy. But they aren't and it is one of the experiences of life. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I felt a great emptiness inside, as if I had been searching for some glimpse, not outside but within myself, and had discovered that there was nothing to be found. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Imagine someone is racing intentionally towards his own destruction and you can save him - do you go ahead and save him? Imagine there's an operation, and the patient is a drug user and the drugs are incompatible with the anesthetic, but the patient is ashamed of being an addict and does not want to tell the anesthesiologist - do you talk to the anesthesiologist? Imagine a trial and a defendant who will be convicted if he doesn't admit to being left handed - do you tell the judge what's going on? Imagine he's gay, and could not have committed the crime because he's gay, but is ashamed of being gay. It isn't a question of whether the defendant should be ashamed of being left-handed or gay
just imagine that he is ~ Bernhard Schlink

When did you know you were going to be a writer?
I knew it when I was young, I forgot it in my 30ties, then I remembered it again. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Did my moral upbrining somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing- then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn't stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation. ~ Bernhard Schlink

When she had fallen asleep on me, and the saw in the yard was quiet, and a blackbird was singing as the colors of things in the kitchen dimmed until nothing remained of them but lighter and darker shades of gray, I was completely happy. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I can't say I'm thankful about being German because I sometimes experience it as a huge burden. But it is an integral part of me and I wouldn't want to escape it. I have accepted it. ~ Bernhard Schlink

But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. ~ Bernhard Schlink

There's no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I love writing, and I am never as happy as when I have a week, a month - three months - with nothing to do but write. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success ... whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Being ill when you are a child or growing up is such an enchanted interlude! The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferate out of the books you read. The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into something new, both familiar and strange; monsters come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet, and chairs, tables, bookcases and wardrobes burst out of their normal shapes and become mountains and buildings and ships you can almost touch although they're far away. Through the long hours of the night you have the Church clock for company and the rumble of the occasional passing car that throws it's headlights across the walls and ceilings. These are hours without sleep, which is not to say they're sleepless, because on the contrary, they're not about lack of anything, they are rich and full. Desires, memories, fears, passions form labryinths in which we lose and find then lose ourselves again. They are hours where anything is possible, good or bad. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? ~ Bernhard Schlink

So I was still guilty. And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that. ~ Bernhard Schlink

People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren't therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn't go there to learn. One becomes very clear about these things. What are you asking for? Forgiveness for her? Or do you just want to feel better yourself? My advice, go to the theatre, if you want catharsis, please. Go to literature. Don't go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing. ~ Bernhard Schlink

What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever. ~ Bernhard Schlink

In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched; I saw myself functioning at the university, with my parents and brother and sister and my friends, but inwardly I felt no involvement. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Now to escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I didn't like the way I looked, the way I dressed and moved, what I achieved and what I felt I was worth. But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I'd be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I feel in remembering myself. ~ Bernhard Schlink

She liked being alone, and she was alone a lot. When she met people, she often found them deeply strange, their behavior incomprehensible, their confidence unsettling. ~ Bernhard Schlink

Sometimes I had the feeling that all of us in his family were like pets to him. The dog you take for a walk, the cat you play with and that curls up in your lap, purring, to be stroked - you can be fond of them, you can even need them to a certain extent, and nonetheless the whole thing - buying pet food, cleaning up the cat box, and trips to the vet - is really too much. Your life is elsewhere. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I wanted reality to drive out the clichés. ~ Bernhard Schlink

As an author, you hope for a director and a cast that will make something wonderful out of your book. ~ Bernhard Schlink

The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferate out of the books you read. The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into something new, both familiar and strange; monsters come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet, and chairs, tables, bookcases and wardrobes burst out of their normal shapes and become mountains and buildings and ships you can almost touch although they're far away ~ Bernhard Schlink

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.. ~ Bernhard Schlink

As an author, you can't expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that's what you hope for, you shouldn't sell the rights. ~ Bernhard Schlink

You don't have the power to upset me. You don't matter enough to upset me. ~ Bernhard Schlink

In spite of the fact that she pushed me away again and again, and again and again I crawled to her. ~ Bernhard Schlink

What I really like about law is that it's not an endless discourse like history or philosophy. In law, there comes a point where problems have to be solved, and cases decided. ~ Bernhard Schlink

I really, really love Hilary Clinton. I think she's very cool. She's out there and she's involved. ~ Sandra Bernhard

We even understand a philosophical essay better if we do not gobble it up entirely and at one go, but pick out a detail from which we then arrive at the whole, if we are lucky. Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and perfect are basically abhorrent to us. Only when we are fortunate enough to turn something whole, something complete or indeed perfect into a fragment, when we get down to reading it, only then do we experience a high degree, at times indeed a supreme degree, of pleasure in it. ~ Thomas Bernhard

You can't just try to be a performer. It's in your DNA. I really believe that it's either what you are or it's not at all. ~ Sandra Bernhard

Not long ago Aveline got a call from the county sheriff for Index, Washington. Local fishermen found a drifter by the name of Moss Ballot dead on the banks of the Skykomish River. There were no signs of struggle, only whiskey in his blood and traces of river in his lungs, likely from having fallen face-first and taken his last breaths underwater. He'd set up camp in the trees under a tarp. It seemed he'd been there for a while, living off fish and canned beans. There wasn't much worth keeping, according to the sheriff. He did say that inside the wax duffel bag there was a diary, the one I'd given to him, it turns out. Inside it were written the words *For my children Wes and Annaclaire in care of Aveline Blue, Burden Falls, Montana*. There was one sentence, the start of a story never written but told nonetheless: *I lose everything*. The rest of the pages were blank. ~ Susan Bernhard

To a Christian, Easter Sunday means everything, when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. ~ Bernhard Langer

All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it's in my genes, as Wertheimer said, I thought. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless world in which everything is always devastating and deadly. That's why he especially loved Dostoevsky and all his disciples, Russian literature in general, because it actually is a deadly literature, but also the depressing French philosophers. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Anyone, any type of story, it doesn't have to be a crime victim, you don't have to let yourself be food for the media. ~ Bernhard Goetz

I took a few steps toward the kitchen window although I'd already realized I couldn't look through the kitchen window because, as already mentioned, it's covered with filth from top to bottom. Austrian kitchen windows are all totally filthy and we can't look through them and naturally it's to our greatest advantage, I thought, not to be able to look through them because then we find ourselves staring into the mouth of catastrophe, into the chaos of Austrian kitchen filth. ~ Thomas Bernhard

For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe. ~ Ruth Bernhard

I must have made a pitiful, indeed pitiable impression on an observer, though there was none – unless I'm going to say that I am an observer of myself, which is stupid, since I am my own observer anyway: I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists only of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself. But all the time I ask myself what I have to save myself from? ~ Thomas Bernhard

When you're constantly looking for things from other people, you're not looking within yourself. ~ Sandra Bernhard

I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs. ~ Thomas Bernhard

In the end we remember all the students we've gone to school with and invite them to our homes only to find out that we no longer have the least thing in common with them, I thought. ~ Thomas Bernhard

People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men - to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment - when in fact it is purely and simply a question of finding their way to themselves. Let each first find his way to himself! And since hardly anyone has yet found his way to himself, it is inconceivable that any of these unfortunate millions has ever found his way to another human being - or to his neighbour, as they say, dripping with self-deception. ~ Thomas Bernhard

At no time do I come from a cynical point of view. I'm coming from a concerned point of view. ~ Sandra Bernhard

If you come home to a household of chaos and anger and fear, you're not going to feel protected from the world. ~ Sandra Bernhard

I'm no snapshot artist. I make very careful choices always, even if I'm using a 35mm camera. ~ Ruth Bernhard

Every player has the option to have metal spikes or other spikes or whatever they feel most comfortable in. ~ Bernhard Langer

Then she wanted to know more about the funeral, but I didn't know what else to report, I had already said everything about Wertheimer's funeral, more or less everything. Was it a Jewish funeral, the innkeeper wanted to know. I said, no, no Jewish funeral, he was buried the fastest way possible, I said, everything went so fast I almost missed it. The ~ Thomas Bernhard

The country robs a thinking person of everything and gives him virtually nothing, whereas the city is perpetually giving. One has simply to see this, and of course feel it, but very few either see it or feel it, with the result that most people are sentimentally drawn to the country, where in no time they are inevitably sucked dry, deflated, and destroyed. The mind cannot develop in the country; it can develop only in the city, yet today everyone flees from the city to the country because people are basically too indolent to use their minds, on which the city makes the greatest demands, and so they choose to perish surrounded by nature, admiring it without knowing it, instead of seizing upon all the benefits the city has to offer, which have increased and multiplied quite miraculously over the years, and never more so than in recent years. ~ Thomas Bernhard

It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have laboured upon it. ~ Bernhard Riemann

And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast. This conclusion would have endeared itself to the warm heart of Alfred Nobel. My contribution to it makes me feel less unworthy of the honour which you have conferred upon me in his name. ~ Charles Nicolle

We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money ... ~ Thomas Bernhard

FLEISCHMANN: Since the days of Sigmund Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis the interpretation of dreams has played a big role in Austria[n life]. What is your attitude to all that?

BERNHARD: I've never spent enough time reading Freud to say anything intelligent about him. Freud has had no effect whatsoever on dreams, or on the interpretation of dreams. Of course psychoanalysis is nothing new. Freud didn't discover it; it had of course always been around before. It just wasn't practiced on such a fashionably huge scale, and in such million-fold, money-grubbing forms, as it has been now for decades, and as it won't be for much longer. Because even in America, as I know, it's fallen so far out of fashion that they just lay people out on the celebrated couch and scoop their psychological guts out with a spoon.

FLEISCHMANN: I take it then that psychoanalysis is not a means gaining knowledge for you?

BERNHARD: Well, no; for me it's never been that kind of thing. I think of Freud simply as a good writer, and whenever I've read something of his, I've always gotten the feeling of having read the work of an extraordinary, magnificent writer. I'm no competent judge of his medical qualifications, and as for what's known as psychoanalysis, I've personally always tended to think of it as nonsense or as a middle-aged man's hobby-horse that turned into an old man's hobby-horse. But Freud's fame is well-deserved, because of course he was a genuinely great, ~ Thomas Bernhard

Prayer means lovingly contemplating the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, allowing our hearts to be enkindled to praise and adore the love and omnipotence of the most blessed Trinity. ~ Basilea Schlink

If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning ~ Ruth Bernhard

I feel that everything has to come from the heart, and it cannot come from the intellect. ~ Ruth Bernhard

I am always hoping to do another CD. This atmosphere has been difficult. ~ Sandra Bernhard

Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought. ~ Thomas Bernhard

I don't consider myself a comic but a performer. A comic tells bad jokes. ~ Sandra Bernhard