In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are...

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this...

Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is...

He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep...

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.

Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist....

…we can pretend that the book in question is not Mr. West’s but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.

The heart can be a mysterious organ, the heart and its movements. Dark, the Spanish call it. The dark heart, el oscuro cotazón. Are you sure you are not just a little dark-hearted, Paul, despite...

Den Staat kümmert nicht, ob der Bürger lebt oder stirbt. Wichtig für den Staat und sein Archiv ist, ob der Bürger am Leben oder tot ist.

Diese Haltung zur Opferung von Menschenleben ist seltsam. Militärbefehlshaber überlegen nicht zweimal, wenn sie Soldaten in die Schlacht schicken und dabei genau wissen, dass viele von ihnen sterben werden. […] Andererseits verbietet es der Offiziersethos,...

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.

It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.

Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

[I]n Amerika wird das Modell des Ich als ein Geist, der eine Maschine bewohnt, auf volkstümlicher Ebene fast unbestritten hingenommen.

Asymmetrie [macht] Menschen unglücklich.

An aversion came over me that we feel for all the mutilated. Why is that so, do you think? Because they put us in mind of what we would rather forget: how easily, at the...

Treblinka – 100% human stereate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this?Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only...

Für wahre Marktgläubige macht es keinen Sinn, wenn du sagst, dass es dir kein Vergnügen macht, dich in einen Wettbewerb mit deinen Mitmenschen zu begeben, und dass du dich lieber zurückziehen möchtest. Du kannst dich...

Worte entfremden. Sprache ist kein Medium für Begehren. Begehren ist Hingerissensein, nicht Austausch. Nur dadurch, dass die Sprache das Begehrte entfremdet, beherrscht sie es.

That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitive emulsions was waning, that to the rising...

All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I own proof that I am a...

I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial....

I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground… And so are you. So are we all.

Wir werden als abhängige Bürger geboren. Vom Moment unserer Geburt an sind wie Abhängige. Ein Zeichen dieser Abhängigkeit ist die Geburtsurkunde. […] Entweder erhälst du die staatliche Urkunde […], was dir zu einer Identität verhilft,...

Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.

Not only may you not enter the state without certification: you are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead; and you can be certified dead only by an officer...

Es ist nicht die Sprache, die den Menschen zum Menschen macht, sondern die Sprache der anderen.

How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard...

Auf den Stachel des Begehrens haben wir nur eine Antwort: fangen, einschließen, festhalten.

Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: ‘For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.’ … he…...

I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty...

Hinter der Kritik am müßigen Leben und der Rechtfertigung unablässigen Geschäftigseins stehen Auffassungen, die nicht länger ausgesprochen werden müssen, so offenkundig erscheinen sie: dass jedermann auf Erden der einen oder anderen Nation angehören und innerhalb...

Wie es im Zeitalter der Könige naiv gewesen wäre zu glauben, dass der erstgeborene Königssohn der zum Herrschen Geeignetste wäre, so ist es in unserer zeit naiv zu glauben, dass der demokratisch gewählte Machthaber der...

Vielleicht ist es so, dass nur das, was nicht ausgesprochen worden ist, durchlebt werden muss.

Alle äußeren Feinde und Widerstände ermangelnd, eingesperrt in unterdrückende Enge und Ordnung, hat der Mensch schließlich keine andere Wahl, als sich selbst zu einem Abenteuer zu machen.

Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea...

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where...

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That’s what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or...

if Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judea, a big operator. It was because he was indifferent to politics, and made his indifference clear, that he...

I urge you: don’t cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them.

Geschichte lebt nicht, wenn man ihr keine Heimat im Bewusstsein gibt; sie ist eine Last, die kein freier Mensch zu tragen gezwungen werden kann.

Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

Die Herren der Information haben die Poesie aus dem Auge verloren, wo Worte eine Bedeutung haben können, die sehr von der im Lexikon angegebenen abweicht, wo der metaphorische Funke der Dechiffrierfunktion immer einen Sprung voraus...

Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord.

That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth-shaking, not with him.What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A passing...

Obwohl diese afrikanischen Militärbanden oft nicht größer oder mächtiger sind als die organisierten kriminellen Banden in Asien oder Osteuropa, wird über ihre Aktivitäten in den Medien – sogar in den westlichen Medien – unter der...