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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" I am a broken person. "

Herta Muller

Person

I Am

" I learned Romanian very late, when I was fifteen, in town, and I wanted to learn it. I like the language very much. "

" 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. "

" What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand. "

" Ceausescu was mad, and he made half of Romania mad. I'm mad because of him. "

" My mother tongue is German. "

" One is either destroyed by adapting or for refusing to. "

" I believe that literature always goes precisely there where the damage to a person has been done. "

" Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier. "

" Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language. "

" I speak a kind of Hapsburg language. "

" Working with language requires beauty for me. "

" 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. "

" You can't build a future if you don't have a past. "

" We didn't have any books at home. Not even children's books or fairy tales. The only 'fantastic' stories came from religion class. And I took them all very literally, that God sees everything, and so I felt I was always being watched. Or that dead people were in Heaven right over our village. "

" Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand. "

" I write in order to bear witness to life. "

" If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you. "

" If I don't belong because of what I think and because of my opinions, then so be it. What can one do about it? One can't bend over backwards or pretend to be someone else just to belong. And in any case, it doesn't work. Once you no longer belong, it's over. "

" Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished. "

" 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. "

" As a child, I perceived my mother as an old woman. "

" Happiness may perhaps be shared. But not luck, sadly. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it? "

" In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations. "

" Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery. "

Herta Muller

Road

Literature