Shatter The German Night Quotes

Their eyes met; neither would forget. ~ Jud Newborn

At night they emerge from the water, stalking over the grassy field, leaving bits of themselves on the ground. They gather at my bedside – Bum, Harold, David, the father I'd known before the war, and my neighbor Mr. Lang – and they gaze down on me, whispering revelations of who they were and who I am.
And the strongest voice belongs to the German, who looks upon me with concern and warmth, and he tells me, "If you can stand up, you'll live. ~ Lee Thomas

That night Koch... tacked Chalmers down at a cocktail party for the conferencees and chastised him for his speech. It is precisely because philisophical approaches to consciousness have all failed that scientists must focue on the brain, Koch declared in his rapid-fire German-accented voice, his rubberneckers gathered. Chalmers's information-based theory of consciousness, Koch continued, liek all philosophical ideas, was untestable and therefore useless. "Why don't you just say that when you have a brain the Holy Ghost comes down and makes you conscious!" Koch exlaimed. Such a theory was unnecissarily complicated, Chalmers responded drily, and it would not accord with his own subjective experience. "But how do I know that your subjective experience is the same as mine?" Koch sputtered. "How do I even know you're conscious? ~ John Horgan

When it got to be time to design the week - a period of time, unlike the day, month, and year, with no intrinsic astronomical significance - it was assigned seven days, each named after one of the seven anomalous lights in the night sky. We can readily make out the remnants of this convention. In English, Saturday is Saturn's day. Sunday and Mo[o]nday are clear enough. Tuesday through Friday are named after the gods of the Saxon and kindred Teutonic invaders of Celtic/Roman Britain: Wednesday, for example, is Odin's (or Wodin's) day, which would be more apparent if we pronounced it as it's spelled, "Wedn's Day"; Thursday is Thor's day; Friday is the day of Freya, goddess of love. The last day of the week stayed Roman, the rest of it became German. ~ Carl Sagan

It's quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that. ~ Diane Kruger

When I am billeted a German home even for one night I go out and search for the chickens and rabbits or pets and give them water and food if possible. Generally the family has pulled out too rapidly to care for such things. I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it. ~ Robert M. Edsel

German puppets
burnt the Jews
Jewish puppets
did not choose
Puppet vultures
eat the dead
Puppet corpses
they are fed
Puppet winds and
puppet waves
Puppet sailors
in their graves
Puppet flower
Puppet stem
Puppet Time
dismantles them
Puppet me and
puppet you
Puppet German
Puppet Jew
Puppet presidents
command
puppet troops to
burn the land
Puppet fire
puppet flames
feed on all the
puppet names
Puppet lovers
in their bliss
turn away from
all of this
Puppet reader
shakes his head
takes his puppet
wife to bed
Puppet night
comes down to say
the epilogue to
puppet day ~ Leonard Cohen

AN ESTIMATED 1,100 Londoners were killed during the April 16 raids - the most devastating night of the Blitz thus far. But it held that distinction for only three days; on April 19, German bombers hit London again, killing more than 1,200 persons. Almost half a million London residents lost their homes in the two attacks. The ~ Lynne Olson

In 1941, the BBC was setting up local, low-powered transmitters that were switched off if there was an air raid so they couldn't be used by German planes to navigate. As a 'youth in training,' my job was to switch the transmitter on in the mornings and off at night, and to check that it, and the feeder land lines, were working. ~ Michael Bond

German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun. ~ Anthony Doerr

I remember once, on a family skiing trip to the Alps, Dad's practical joking got all of us into a particularly tight spot.
I must have been about age ten at the time, and was quietly excited when Dad spotted a gag that was begging to be played out on the very serious-looking Swiss-German family in the room next door to us.
Each morning their whole family would come downstairs, the mother dressed head to toe in furs, the father in a tight-fitting ski suit and white neck scarf, and their slightly overweight, rather snooty-looking thirteen-year-old son behind, often pulling faces at me.
The hotel had the customary practice of having a breakfast form that you could hang on your door handle the night before if you wanted to eat in your room. Dad thought it would be fun to fill out our form, order 35 boiled eggs, 65 German sausages, and 17 kippers, then hang it on the Swiss-German family's door.
It was too good a gag to pass up.
We didn't tell Mum, who would have gone mad, but instead filled out the form with great hilarity, and sneaked out last thing before bed and hung it on their door handle.
At 7:00 A.M. we heard the father angrily sending the order back. So we repeated the gag the next day.
And the next.
Each morning the father got more and more irate, until eventually Mum got wind of what we had been doing and made me go around to apologize. (I don't know why I had to do the apologizing when the whole thing had been Dad's idea, but I gu ~ Bear Grylls

In Holland, Ron was the battalion S-2 Intelligence officer for Colonel Robert Strayer. While on reconnaissance, Ron paddled across the Neder Rhine alone at night. The enemy opened fire on him and he dove into the water with a German bullet in his butt. He finished recrossing the river by swimming and was found bleeding and exhausted on the south shore. In spite of his wound, he brought back critical information and later received the Silver Star for that adventure. ~ Marcus Brotherton

Yet there is one experience which most sincere ex-Communists share, whether or not they go only part way to the end of the question it poses. The daughter of a former German diplomat in Moscow was trying to explain to me why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had been extremely pro-Communist, had become an implacable anti-Communist. It was hard for her because, as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed her. 'He was immensely pro-Soviet,' she said,' and then -- you will laugh at me -- but you must not laugh at my father -- and then -- one night -- in Moscow -- he heard screams. That's all. Simply one night he heard screams.'

A child of Reason and the 20th century, she knew that there is a logic of the mind. She did not know that the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind's. She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams. ~ Whittaker Chambers

One night, after they had made love, Pelletier got up naked and went looking among his books for a novel by Archimboldi. After hesitating for a moment he decided on The leather mask, thinking that with some luck Vanessa might read it as a horror novel, might be attracted by the sinister side of the book. She was surprised at first by the gift, then touched, since she was used to her clients giving her clothes or shoes or lingerie. Really, she was very happy with it, especially when Pelletier explained who Archimboldi was and the role the German writer played in his life.
"It's as if you were giving me a part of you", said Vanessa.
The remark left Pelletier a bit confused, since in a way it was perfectly true, Archimboldi was by now a part of him, the author belonged to him insofar as Pelletier had, a long with few others, instituted a new reading of the German, a reading that would endure, a reading as ambitious as Archimboldi's writing, and this reading would keep pace with Archimboldi's writing for a long time, until the reading was exhausted or until Archimboldi's writing - the capacity of Archimboldian oeuvre to spark emotions and revelations - was exhausted (but he didn't believe that would happen), though in another way it wasn't true, because sometimes, especially since he and Espinoza had given up their trips to London and stopped seeing Liz Norton, Archimboldi's work, his novels and stories, that is, seemed completely foreign, a shapeless and mysterious ver ~ Roberto Bolano

The flimsy things broke apart as they crashed on the sidewalk, sheets of papers fluttering off like doves released from cages.
As he turned back to Selena, he braced himself, trying to think of a way to reassure her
Au contraire.
Selena was alive with excitement, her fangs flashing thanks to a huge smile, a giggling laugh bubbling out of her as she hung on to the door.
"Faster!" she yelled at Fritz. "Let's go even faster!"
"As you wish, mistress!"
A fresh roar from that massive piece of German engineering under the hood sent them careening not just down the sidewalk, but right up to the very edge of the laws of physics.
Selena looked over at him. "This is the best night ever! ~ J.R. Ward

The cultural code of the stiff upper lip is not for her boys. She is teaching them that it is not "sissy" to show their feelings to others. When she took Prince William to watch the German tennis star Steffi Graff win the women's singles final at Wimbledon last year they left the royal box to go backstage and congratulate her on her victory. As Graff walked off court down the dimly lit corridor to the dressing room, royal mother and son thought Steffi looked so alone and vulnerable out of the spotlight. So first Diana, then William gave her a kiss and an affectionate hug.
The way the Princess introduced her boys to her dying friend, Adrian Ward-Jackson, was a practical lesson in seeing the reality of life and death. When Diana told her eldest son that Adrian had died, his instinctive response revealed his maturity. "Now he's out of pain at last and really happy." At the same time the Princess is acutely aware of the added burdens of rearing two boys who are popularly known as "the heir and the spare." Self-discipline is part of the training. Every night at six o'clock the boys sit down and write thank-you notes or letters to friends and family. It is a discipline which Diana's father instilled in her, so much so that if she returns from a dinner party at midnight she will not sleep easily unless she has penned a letter of thanks.
William and Harry, now ten and nearly eight respectively, are now aware of their destiny. On one occasion the boys were discussing their ~ Andrew Morton

There was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down. ~ Joni Mitchell

There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed. Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes on with what he was doing...Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big shell, he says, "Jerry was bad last night," as he would discuss a windstorm. ~ John Steinbeck

Then he shows up one night, drunk, and screams at Scott in a mixture of German and English, calling Scott the American Communist boiling-potter, a phrase her husband treasures to the end of his days. Scott, far from sober himself (in Germany Scott and sober rarely even exchange postcards), at one point offers the sonofabitching landlord a cigarette and tells him Goinzee on! ~ Stephen King

That's the Staatsoper," says Neumann Two one night. The facade of a grand building rises gracefully, pilastered and crenelated. Stately wings soar on either side, somehow both heavy and light. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them? When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences while German privates tuck live grenades in their pockets and run? Opera ~ Anthony Doerr

Eric, my German hairdresser, was waiting for me in the large dressing room upstairs. He'd cut my auburn hair since I was six and had seen it through tragic self-trimmings of my bangs, unfortunate summers of excessive Sun-In use, and horrible home perms gone terribly wrong. He'd never shrunk from haughtily chastising me through my follicular antics and had thrown in plenty of Teutonic life coaching along the way, on every subject from pimply high school boys to current events and politics. And he'd pretty much made me feel equal parts stupid and uncultured on more than one occasion with his superior knowledge of theater and art and opera.
But I loved him. He was important to me. So when I asked him to come to my wedding to transform my hair into an elegant and sexy and uncontrived but polished updo, Eric had answered, simply, "Yes."
And the moment I sat down in the chair, he chastised me for washing my hair right before I arrived.
"Ees juss too smooz," Eric scolded.
"I'm sorry," I begged. "Please don't ground me, Eric. I didn't want my head to stink on my wedding night."
And for the first time ever, I saw Eric crack a relaxed, mellow smile.
I loved it that Eric was there. ~ Ree Drummond

I've just been wandering the streets at night. If I came by a German soldier out alone, I would follow him, shove the pistol to the back of his head, and shoot. Once, I even did two at the same time, but they were really drunk."


Poul-Erik aka 'Willy'
The Informer by Steen Langstrup ~ Steen Langstrup

Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father, who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people; it had marvelous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that here cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light of the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium. ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

A perfectly routine piece of news: "Last night our planes attacked Dresden. All planes returned safely." The only good German is a dead one: over one hundred thousand evil men, women, and children (the able-bodied were at the fronts) forever purged of their sins against humanity. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart's desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never - and I say so not with pride but with shame - has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths. ~ Stefan Zweig

In other words, our conscious representations are sometimes ordered (or arranged in a pattern) before they have become conscious to us. The 18th-century German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss gives an example of an experience of such an unconscious order of ideas: He says that he found a certain rule in the theory of numbers "not by painstaking research, but by the Grace of God, so to speak. The riddle solved itself as lightning strikes, and I myself could not tell or show the connection between what I knew before, what I last used to experiment with, and what produced the final success." The French scientist Henri Poincare is even more explicit about this phenomenon; he describes how during a sleepless night he actually watched his mathematical representations colliding in him until some of them "found a more stable connection. One feels as if one could watch one's own unconscious at work, the unconscious activity partially becoming manifest to consciousness without losing its own character. At such moments one has an intuition of the difference between the mechanisms of the two egos. ~ C.G. Jung

In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue.

What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her?

Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness. ~ J.M. Coetzee

Every morning at 8:27, the estate's two German shorthair pointers imbibed some secret elixir of garlic and hydrochloric acid. Every morning at 8:30, they were released from their pen to pee on everything we'd stupidly left outside the night before, including our dogs, who were probably also violated by the male but couldn't tell us. ~ Wendy Laird

Miriam will never know what kind of dog attacked her, will imagine a Doberman or a German shepherd with snarling, angry teeth despite the fact she bears neither bite marks nor broken skin. It will never cross her mind that the dog was a beagle and that she was knocked over from a surprise more than force. The children of the house she fled will use the incident to convince their parents to keep the dog, which had been on the verge of being given away for its propensity to shit at the slightest hint of thunder it having been sequestered in the garage that night because of a stormy forecast. The family will never know what manner of burglar their fog deflected, will imagine a scruffy, heavy-set man with scars and a limp groping the family jewelery. It will never cross their minds that their intruder was am upper middle-class wife and mother of two who would have had eyes only for their Chinese teakettle. ~ Myla Goldberg

Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, 'Goodness, you're a quick reader!' when you bring back seven books, read fro ~ Zoe Heller

She felt sleep creeping up on her like a relentless tide. She tried to summon up a craving for German chocolates. Or New York traffic. Late-night television. Nope. What she really needed was currently scratching her back with the most careful of scratches, humming an off-key melody under his breath. Jessica smiled. ~ Lynn Kurland

In the daytime, I know that they're (Russians) close. But at night, my optimism abandons me, I buckle. The night is German, and who am I against the night? ~ Ana Novac

At one stopover on the train journey home, Hans told his sister Inge later, he saw a young girl with the Star of David on her breast; she was repairing tracks on the line, along with other people with yellow badges on their clothes. Her face was pallid, sunken in; her eyes, beyond grief and terror. Impulsively, Hans thrust his rations in her hand. She looked up at him, then at his uniform. She threw the packet of food to the ground.
He scooped it up, wiped off the dust, and picked a daisy growing by the side of the tracks. He placed the package, with the daisy on top, at her feet. He said, "I would have liked to give you a little pleasure." He boarded the train.
When he looked back, the girl was standing there, watching the train disappear, the flower in her hair. ~ Jud Newborn

How strange that there would be exactly twenty-four German carpenters in Chicago when the all-night manicure place on the corner of Oakley and Lawrence is called "24/7 Nails. ~ John Green

Rozealle

she is a storm; she is a river
untamed; untouched
she will engulf you; she will shatter you
hold her softly; caress her gently
she is fragile like a rose petal
she is tender like the touch me not leaf
she is the warm glow of the morning sun
she is the magic of a full moon night! ~ Avijeet Das

He found forty, of which he only really liked two: "rose rot" and "to err so."
See inbred girl; lie breeds grin; leering debris; greed be nil, sir; be idle re. rings; ringside rebel; residing rebel; etc.
That's true. Much of the meter in Don Juan only works if you read Juan as syllabic."
Spanish.
Italian.
German.
French and English.
Russian.
Greek.
Latin.
Arabic. ~ John Green

I was very lucky. I don't know German, or Dutch, or Chinese, or Thai. I don't know them, so I can't judge, so I have to go on the word of the publisher that it's a good translation. ~ Sandra Cisneros

After the German abstention at the UN, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle commented that Germany doesn't always have to stand on the side of its traditional allies. Berlin can look for new partners all over the world. ~ Donald Rumsfeld

It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at. ~ Enoch Powell

The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer. ~ Diana Trilling

Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are not consciously disdainful of the importance of knowing how things work. On the contrary, they have gone to great pains to learn what saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and business in them. They take this with such devotion that when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening tho shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside. ~ Jane Jacobs

Like so many of our people, we have now had a personal experience of German barbarity which only strengthens the resolution of all of us to fight through to final victory. ~ George VI

Todd says that the doctor was rather horrified because we passed a German who had had his head shot off, but his arms and legs were still waving about and strange noises were coming out of him, and i thought even the doctor was a bit turned over by that. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

The idea that the word of God should be permitted to calcify slowly into a language normal people can't read is one of the reasons we had a Protestant Reformation, a movement launched by a monk whose first act a er defying a church council with, "My conscience is captive to the word of God" was to hole himself up in Wartburg castle and translate the Bible into German. There he sat; he could do no other. ~ Mark L. Ward Jr.

As a contrast to this kind of democracy we have the German democracy, which is a true democracy; for here the leader is freely chosen and is obliged to accept full responsibility for all his actions and omissions. The problems to be dealt with are not put to the vote of the majority; but they are decided upon by the individual, and as a guarantee of responsibility for those decisions he pledges all he has in the world and even his life. ~ Adolf Hitler