The past has to be remembered, so that it’s never repeated.
BERNHARD SCHLINKDesires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.
More Bernhard Schlink Quotes
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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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We make our own truths and lies….Truths are often lies and lies truths.
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Or is there no such thing as ‘too late’? Is there only ‘late’ and is ‘late’ always better than ‘never’? I don’t know.
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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.
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Philosophy has forgotten about children
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Now to escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere.
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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.
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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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But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive – a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breast and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body
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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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Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.
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When we open ourselves you yourself to me and I myself to you, when we submerge you into me and I into you when we vanish into me you and into you I Then am I me and you are you.
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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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The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?
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Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. Sometimes I thought she just bullied me. But either way, I had no choice.
BERNHARD SCHLINK