I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.
BERNHARD SCHLINKPeople 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.
More Bernhard Schlink Quotes
-
-
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.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
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.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
…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.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
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 -
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.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
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
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
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.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
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?
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
There’s no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
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.
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?
BERNHARD SCHLINK -
The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?
BERNHARD SCHLINK