Herta Muller quotes:

In writing, one searches, and that is what keeps one writing, that one sees and experiences things from another angle entirely; one experiences oneself during the process of writing.

Before the war an apple tree had stood behind the church. It was an apple tree that ate its own apples.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.

When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

Women always need other women to lean on. They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become.

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?

In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations.

Today the grass listens when I speak of love. It seems to me that this word isn't honest even with itself.

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand,

Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes.

I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.

In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.

Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?

My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn't be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands.

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.

Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity".

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it's no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.

What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry.

What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.

Who can take a single step with his head?