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81 " Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I never can be. "
― Bernhard Schlink , The Reader
82 " I wanted reality to drive out the clichés. "
83 " It was like being a prisoner on death row who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objective eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness tha he brings to the murders and deaths themselves. All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life's functions are reduced to minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators , too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenary, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk. "
84 " I know that disavowal is an unusal form of betrayal. From the outside it is impossible to tell if you are disowning someone or simply exercising discretion, being considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what you're doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal. "
― Bernhard Schlink
85 " When an airplane's engines fail, it is not the end of the flight. "
86 " Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. "
87 " The past has to be remembered, so that it's never repeated. "
― Bernhard Schlink , Flights of Love: Stories
88 " I knew none of it then - if indeed I know any of it now and am not just making patterns in the air. "
89 " You don’t have the power to upset me. You don’t matter enough to upset me. "
90 " I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought and decided. It has its own sources.لا أقصد التفكير والوصول إلى قرار ليس لهما تأثير على الفعل ، لكن الفعل لا يتأتى بمجرد التفكير في شيء ، ثم اتخاذ قرار بفعله ، بل له مصادره التي تخصه. "
91 " Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides. "
92 " Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation. "
93 " I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers. "
― Bernhard Schlink , Homecoming
94 " She liked being alone, and she was alone a lot. When she met people, she often found them deeply strange, their behavior incomprehensible, their confidence unsettling. "
95 " We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have. I had to be content with that. "
96 " I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves. "
97 " Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? "
98 " 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? "
99 " The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferate out of the books you read. The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into something new, both familiar and strange; monsters come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet, and chairs, tables, bookcases and wardrobes burst out of their normal shapes and become mountains and buildings and ships you can almost touch although they're far away "
100 " The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nevertheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear. Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I never can be. "