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1 " you have to hate anyone who can dismiss you, even if they're good to you, because you work for them and not with them. "
― Irmgard Keun , The Artificial Silk Girl
2 " Pretty girls are a business' I say, 'and that has nothing do to with love "
3 " Do you love me, just a teensy-weensy bit, my dove, or is it just my money?' he asks full of fear - and that moves me so much that I actually start to have some feelings for him. "
4 " If a young woman from money marries an old man because of money and nothing else and makes love to him for hours and has this pious look on her face, she's called a German mother and a decent woman. If a young woman without money sleeps with a man with no money because he has smooth skin and she likes him, she's a whore and a bitch. "
5 " They have courses teaching you foreign languages and ballroom dancing and etiquette and cooking. But there are no classes to learn how to be by yourself in a furnished room with chipped dishes, or how to be alone in general without any words of concern or familiar sounds. "
6 " Yes, there are stars," I lie and I give them to him--there are no stars--but there must be some behind the clouds and they must be shining inside-out tonight. I love stars, but I hardly ever notice them. I guess when you're blind, you realize how much you forget to see. "
7 " Vater unser, mach mir noch mit einem Wunder eine feine Bildung- das Übrige kann ich ja selbst machen mit Schminke. "
8 " That says a lot, if somebody pleases you - love is so much more that I'm thinking, perhaps it doesn't exist at all. "
9 " I hesitate to demonstrate my ignorance, which is never a good idea, by the way. Because you only get oppressed. "
10 " The city isn't good and the city isn't happy and the city is sick," he says--"but you are good and I thank you for that. "
11 " Father thou art in heaven, please make my inside so good and so fine that he can love me. I'm going to buy him a tie, because that's something I can do. Someone once told me that I have an almost masculine understanding of it. i guess there are situations where having a past is to your advantage. Heavenly Father, perform a miracle and give me an education--I can do the rest myself with make-up. "
12 " There are bars with women wearing shirts with stiff necks and ties and they are terribly proud to be perverts, as if that weren't something nobody can do anything about. "
13 " But I say: "Tilli, sometimes women too are sensual and want only that one thing." And there's no difference. Because sometimes I only want to wake up with someone in the morning, all messed up from kissing and half dead and without any energy to think, but wonderfully tired and rested at the same time. "
14 " All the people are in a hurry--and sometimes they look pale under those lights, then the girls' dresses look like they're not paid off yet and the men can't really afford the wine--is nobody really happy? Now it's all getting dark. Where is my shiny Berlin? "
15 " And it was then that I knew what it means to be lucky--lucky to have met a person during those three minutes of the day that he's good. Because I have a lot of time on my hands--you can imagine that that adds up. there are 24 hours in a day, and half of that is night. That leaves you with 12. And that's 12 times 60 minutes, that is, 720 minutes minus three minutes of goodness still leaves you with 717 minutes worth of nasty ordinary person. "
16 " I so want to give him my notebook--I want to be a real person--he should read my book--I work for him, I cook for him, I'm Doris--Doris isn't just some piece of dirt. I don't want to be innocent, I want to be the real Doris here and not that silly civilized product of the Green Moss's imagination. "
17 " And sometimes somebody is laughing--and that laugh is stuffing all of yesterday's and today's anger back into the mouth that it's oozing from. "
18 " And I know for a fact that those who "always have to tell the truth" are definitely lying (63) "
19 " And I think it will be a good thing if I write everything down, because I’m an unusual person. I don’t mean a diary — that’s ridiculous for a trendy girl like me. But I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it’s going to become even more so. And I look like Colleen Moore, if she had a perm and her nose were a little more fashionable, like pointing up. And when I read it later on, everything will be like at the movies — I’m looking at myself in pictures. "
20 " We went to the movies together. It was a movie about girls in uniforms. They were high-class girls, but they had the same problems I have. You love somebody and that brings tears to your eyes and gives you a red nose. You love somebody--it's nothing you can understand. It doesn't matter whether it's a man or a woman or God. "