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Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink Quotes

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Famous Bernhard Schlink Quotes

“I was not disturbed by the fact that the memories made me nostalgic, because I could never bring back the events, or that they made me sad, because they reflected only the positive side of experiences that had their negative side as well. Such is always the case with happy memories. What disturbed me was that they made me more than nostalgic and sad: they made me tired. Deeply, dumbly, blackly tired. (141)”

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Book:Homecoming
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“At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”

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Book:The Reader
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“Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?”

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Author:Bernhard Schlink
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