The Hunger Angel
Herta Müller
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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'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.”
“To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.”
“No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I eat, I am locked up inside the taste of eating. For sixty years, ever since I came back from the camp, I have been eating against starvation.”
“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.”
“Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don’t expect from them.”
“Now I was someone else. We knew each other in a way we no longer were and never would be again. Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you’re so impossibly close is unbearable.”
“Little treasures have a sign that says, Here I am. Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember. But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying, I was there.”
“Nothing had anything to do with me. I was locked up inside myself and evicted from myself. I didn’t belong to them and I was missing me.”
“ Hunger is an object.The angel has climbed into my brain. The angel doesn't think. He thinks straight. He's never absent. He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction. He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me. He knew all this before he met me, and he knows my future. He lingers in every capillary like quicksilver. First a sweetness in my throat. Then pressure on my stomach and chest. The fear is too much. Everything has become lighter. The hunger angel leans to one side as he walks with open eyes. He staggers around in small circles and balances on my breath-swing. He knows the homesickness in the brain and the blind alleys in the air. The air angel leans to the other side as he walks with open hunger. H whispers to himself and to me: where there is loading there can also be unloading. He is of the same flesh that he is deceiving. Will have deceived. He knows about saved bread and cheek-bread and he sends out the white hare. He says he's coming back but stays where he is. When he comes, he comes with force. It's utterly clear: 1 shovel load = 1 gram bread. Hunger is an object.”
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Book Keywords:
emotions, suffering, death, starvation, words, homesickness, social-anxiety, silence, sadness, will-to-live, life, feelings, gulag, selective-mutism, death-and-dying, hunger
