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 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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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 more I suffer, the more I love.
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When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.
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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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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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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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why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark 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 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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There’s no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.
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There’s this old saying that, if you aren’t particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don’t want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don’t know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I’ve never regretted it.
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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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Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.
BERNHARD SCHLINK