The more I suffer, the more I love.
BERNHARD SCHLINKI 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.
More Bernhard Schlink Quotes
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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.
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The more I suffer, the more I love.
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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.
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I certainly know German colleagues in the US 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.
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Now to escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere.
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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.
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Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.
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She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn’t do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.
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Bravery is good when the cause is good.
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What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?
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There’s no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.
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…I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her.
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What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews?
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The past has to be remembered, so that it’s never repeated.
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Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.
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When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.
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I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.
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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
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She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn’t do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.
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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.
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Now to escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere.
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I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible. …And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents.
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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.
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why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?
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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.
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Philosophy has forgotten about children
BERNHARD SCHLINK