Herta Müller

“And I’m different without you. You’re the only one who thinks you’re never different.”

— Herta Müller

Working with language requires beauty for me.

— Herta Muller

“I wanted to work out a trade with things that aren’t alive but aren’t dead either. I wanted to make an emergency…

— Herta Müller

My first book, 'Nadirs,' was very important for me. I'll leave its literary worth for others to judge. But its publication in…

— Herta Muller

“I'm drawn outside to the empty yard of the afternoon. The wind tosses thin snow that crackles against my neck. With open…

— Herta Müller

“The cabbage white flies through the tailor's cheek. The tailor sinks his head. The cabbage white flies out of the back of…

— Herta Müller

“The reasaon I'm shy of objects is because I like them. I transfer the thoughts that are against me onto them. Then…

— Herta Müller

“The gym instructor was the first to raise his hand. All the other hands flew up after his. While raising their hands,…

— Herta Müller

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I…

— Herta Muller

I never wanted to be a writer.

— Herta Muller

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

— Herta Muller

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no…

— Herta Muller

“I wanted love to grow back, like the grass when it’s mown down. To grow differently, if need be, like children’s teeth,…

— Herta Müller

Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery.

— Herta Muller

“Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s…

— Herta Müller

For me, each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my…

— Herta Muller

“Hunger is an object. The angel has climbed into my brain. The angel doesn't think. He thinks straight. He's never absent. He…

— Herta Müller

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

— Herta Muller

What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes…

— Herta Muller

“Little treasures have a sign that says, Here I am. Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember. But the…

— Herta Müller

If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside…

— Herta Muller

“Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don’t expect from them.”

— Herta Müller

“Jak trzeba by żyć, myślałam, żeby pasować do tego co się akurat myśli.”

— Herta Müller

“Occasionally a yellow leaf fell from the tree. Then one or the other of us would turn up his eyes as though…

— Herta Müller

“No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his…

— Herta Müller