Herta Muller Quotes

I went from somebody who didn't sing to somebody who didn't speak.

Growing up, I never expressed myself to nobody. I never told nobody when something was wrong.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

It's been so long since I've let myself feel anger that I don't just feel it. It covers my mouth and I swallow it down, the taste sharp and metal as though I'm gnawing through foilware.

All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.

The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.

Keeping love buried was a lot like jeeping anger pent up, I'd learned. It just ate you up insides until you wanted to scream or kick something.

When you lock everything down tight so that the pain can't get out, you also keep good stuff from getting in.

Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.

hate has no literature: real fear and real hate have no words

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

When we turn our backs on feelings we should deal with, they fester and grow and ultimately consume us. Silence is denial. Silence is anxiety.

That which has quelled me, lives with me, Accomplice in catastrophe.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.

When I cry - when I let myself cry - that's who I cry for. I don't cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that's gone. And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me. The Cassie who kills.

I had always held everything in before.

I have a good friend who says, "We're all just dodging bullets." It seems to me the trick to living a good life is to try to move away from the gun you turn on yourself.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

I was in a very dark place for a long time. It's just so hard to have normalcy.

Margo says, "I know what she's talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It's like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don't meet up right.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.