Herta Muller Quotes

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Herta Muller

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 17, 1953

Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language.

Herta Muller

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

Herta Muller

If I don't belong because of what I think and because of my opinions, then so be it. What can one do about it? One can't bend over backwards or pretend to be someone else just to belong. And in any case, it doesn't work. Once you no longer belong, it's over.

Herta Muller

It was only against my mother's will that I attended the preparatory high school in the city. She wanted me to become a seamstress in the village. She knew that if I moved to the city, I would become corrupted. And I was. I started to read books.

Herta Muller

Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.

Herta Muller

Happiness may perhaps be shared. But not luck, sadly.

Herta Muller

Ceausescu was mad, and he made half of Romania mad. I'm mad because of him.

Herta Muller

Working with language requires beauty for me.

Herta Muller

As a child, I perceived my mother as an old woman.

Herta Muller

For me, each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, have invariably been denied me.

Herta Muller

My mother tongue is German.

Herta Muller

I believe that literature always goes precisely there where the damage to a person has been done.

Herta Muller