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People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy. But they aren’t and it is one of the experiences of life.

Bernhard Schlink

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  The past has to be remembered, so that it’s never repeated.

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  Sometimes all it took was a scene in a movie. This juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity seemed suspicious even to me.

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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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  I 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.

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  It was more dangerous not to go; I was running the risk of becoming trapped in my own fantasies. So I was doing the right thing by going. She would behave normally, I would behave normally, and everything would be normal again.

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  The more I suffer, the more I love.

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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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  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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  I took all the blame. I admitted mistakes I hadn’t made, intentions I’d never had. Whenever she turned cold and hard, I begged her to be good to me again, to forgive me and love me. Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid.

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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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• 

  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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• 

  Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.

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  We make our own truths and lies….Truths are often lies and lies truths.

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  Bravery is good when the cause is good.

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  Now to escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere.

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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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