"The world is not a costume ball,"

Herta Müller Literature See all quotes by Herta Müller →

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“Half starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects.”

“You can think all kinds of things. But you can't know for sure.”

“If you don't have the right things, you improvise. the wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn out to be the only right things, simply because they're what you have.”

“The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse.”

“You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you’ve even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. For here to there it’s all just the farty sputter of lantern. And they call that having lived. It’s not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.”

“Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you're so impossibly close is unbearable.”

Resonant Thoughts

"What constitutes the essential, characteristic difference between everyday reality and the world picture experienced in LSD inebriation? Ego and the outer world are separated in the normal condition o…"

— Albert Hofmann

Art1859–1926

#time

"We shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and a m…"

— Socrates

Literature-469–-398

#death

"I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own…"

— Errol Morris

Literature1948

#nature

"On the supposition that the world is to go on divided among aggressive sovereign states, with phases of war preparation known as peace and acute phases of more and more destructive war, it is quite a …"

— H. G. Wells

Literature1866–1946

#philosophy