Herta Muller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist, and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She is known for her works depicting the harsh realities of life in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu's communist regime. Her novels often feature protagonists struggling to survive and make sense of the world around them in oppressive circumstances.
What is the most famous quote by Herta Muller ?
Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.
— Herta Muller
What can you learn from Herta Muller (Life Lessons)
- Herta Muller's work emphasizes the importance of standing up for one's beliefs, even in the face of adversity.
- Her stories often explore the effects of oppressive regimes on individuals, and how people can resist in their own small ways.
- Through her work, she encourages readers to think critically about the world around them and to be mindful of the power of the individual.
The most perspective Herta Muller quotes that are free to learn and impress others
Following is a list of the best Herta Muller quotes, including various Herta Muller inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Herta Muller.
Women always need other women to lean on.
They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become.
If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.
Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.
I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.
If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.
Who can take a single step with his head?
My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn't be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands.
When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.
Lyrical quotes by Herta Muller
Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.
Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.
I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes.
In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations.
To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.
Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?
Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?
What can be said about chronic hunger.
Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry.
Quotations by Herta Muller that are poignant and surreal
Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.
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.
What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.
In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.
Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall.
They had exchanged fear for insanity".