German Author Quotes

Germany, Germany above everything,
Above everything in the world,
When, for protection and defense, it always
takes a brotherly stand together.
From the Meuse to the Neman,
From the Adige to the Belt,

August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben

And so the little girl grew up: her skin was as white as snow, her cheeks as rosy as the blood, and her hair as black as ebony.

Wednesdays were the best thing about Atlantis. The middle of the week was a traditional holiday there. Everyone stopped work and celebrated the fact that half the week was over.

When it comes to clichés, the Germans are extremely diligent, efficient and disciplined about living up to them.

Rainer Erlinger

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

Berthold Auerbach

The human spirit is itself the most wonderful fairy tale that can possibly be. What a magnificent world lies enclosed within our bosoms! No solar orbit hems it in, the inexhaustible wealth of the total visible creation is outweighed by its riches!

E. T. A. Hoffmann

You were talking to that niche in the wall again, Gwyneth. I saw you." "Yes, but it's my favorite bit of wall, Gordon. I'd hurt its feelings if I didn't stop and talk to it.

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.

In Europe, where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.

Sybille Bedford

History and fiction must complement one another.

My personal history would not be disappointing to readers, but it is my own affair which I want to keep to myself. I am in fact in no way more important than is the typesetter for my books, the man who works the mill; no more important than the man who binds my books and the woman who wraps them and the scrubwoman who cleans up the office.

Nations and men are only the best when they are the gladdest, and deserve heaven when they enjoy it.

Finally democracy is catching up with the old, hierarchical, father-dominated family: the family is being democratized.

What linked them was not only the closeness they'd felt as children, but also the fear of losing that closeness.

"He does seem rather weird," was Hans Castorp's view. "Some of the things he said were very queer: it sounded as if he meant to say that the sun revolves round the earth."

Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.

Erich Maria Remarque

If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.

A thousand enemies outside the house are better than one within. Arab proverb

It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing—it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human species is based on.

Art is a misleading, deceptive superstition; in it we think that we have before us the last, innermost essence of humanity itself; and yet, it merely foists upon us a beautiful product of man, in which are set down all of the egotistical, self-satisfying thoughts and emotions which remain sterile and ineffective in the world of action. And I, imbecile, esteem this product more highly than the human being himself, whom God has created.

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder

I fought windmills with such heavy weapons that I risked dislocating my arm...

It's always hard when you've known a person a long time and then you have to recognise that you have nothing left in common but your memories.

Watch out for people who feel weak. They may want to feel strong one day and you might not survive that moment.

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes.

Frank Schätzing

When Lawrence first found a gentian, a big single blue one, I remember feeling as if he had a strange communion with it, as if the gentian yielded up its blueness, its very essence, to him. Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being.

Frieda Lawrence