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" If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you. "
Herta Muller
Live
Need
You
Related Quotes:
" Working with language requires beauty for me. "
Herta Muller
Beauty
Working
Requires
" 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. "
Herta Muller
Book
Literature
Think
" Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery. "
Herta Muller
Like
Road
Literature
" In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations. "
Herta Muller
Society
Particularly
I Am
" Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language. "
Herta Muller
Sensual
Very
Beautiful
" I am a broken person. "
Herta Muller
Person
Am
I Am
" As a child, I perceived my mother as an old woman. "
Herta Muller
Woman
Old
Child
" I never wanted to be a writer. "
Herta Muller
Never
Wanted
Writer
" It was only against my mother's will that I attended the preparatory high school in the city. She wanted me to become a seamstress in the village. She knew that if I moved to the city, I would become corrupted. And I was. I started to read books. "
Herta Muller
City
School
Mother
" I believe that literature always goes precisely there where the damage to a person has been done. "
Herta Muller
Literature
I Believe
Done
" I write in order to bear witness to life. "
Herta Muller
Write
Order
Life
" 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. "
Herta Muller
Get
Inside
Only
" Happiness may perhaps be shared. But not luck, sadly. "
Herta Muller
Happiness
Shared
Perhaps
" I learned Romanian very late, when I was fifteen, in town, and I wanted to learn it. I like the language very much. "
Herta Muller
Language
Learn
Much
" 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. "
Herta Muller
Time
Mouth
Difficult
" Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand. "
Herta Muller
Anything
Including
Literature
" I speak a kind of Hapsburg language. "
Herta Muller
Kind
Language
Speak
" 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. "
Herta Muller
Always
Way
Things
" Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier. "
Herta Muller
Writing
Through
Different
" You can't build a future if you don't have a past. "
Herta Muller
Future
You
Past
" 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. "
Herta Muller
Consequences
Organizing
Kind
" Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it? "
Herta Muller
Suffering
Human
Human Beings
" Ceausescu was mad, and he made half of Romania mad. I'm mad because of him. "
Herta Muller
Half
Because
Romania
" One is either destroyed by adapting or for refusing to. "
Herta Muller
Either
Destroyed
Adapting
" Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished. "
Herta Muller
Know
Doing
Only
" For me, each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, have invariably been denied me. "
Herta Muller
Me
Time
My Life
" What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand. "
Herta Muller
Labor
Silent
Writing
" My first book, 'Nadirs,' was very important for me. I'll leave its literary worth for others to judge. But its publication in Berlin in 1984 gave me protection. As did the awards it won. The Romanian secret police could no longer treat me and my friends as though we were completely cut off from the rest of the world. And we no longer felt cut off. "
Herta Muller
World
Book
Police
" My mother tongue is German. "
Herta Muller
German
Mother
Mother Tongue
" In writing, one searches, and that is what keeps one writing, that one sees and experiences things from another angle entirely; one experiences oneself during the process of writing. "
Herta Muller
Things
Process
Experiences