German Novelist Quotes

Thomas Mann

Hermann Hesse

Heinrich Böll

Heinrich von Kleist

Joseph von Eichendorff

Anna Seghers

Jean Paul

Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot.

None but the estimable shall hear from me that I esteem them. The whole world is entitled to my courtesy, but greater tribute than that must be earned through virtuous acts.

Sophie von La Roche

No fight is harder than the struggle against the thing you want most to believe.

Large animals, John thought, move more slowly than mice and wasps. Perhaps he was secretly a giant.

True love does not paralyze, but doubles the high qualities of man.

What can I expect here? You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don't you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn't bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: 'What do you think you're waiting for? You've been in Hell for a long time already.

A neglect of one's sentimental education early in life could bear the most unfortunate fruit.

Daniel Kehlmann

Crises of expression and spasms of eros:
that's the man of today,
the inside a vacuum,
the continuity of personality
provided by his suit,
which with stout cloth might be good for ten years.

Those whom God wishes to show true favour
He sends out into the great wide world.

Joseph von Eichendorff

To live in a place where I am not, and in a time that is either past or not yet come.

Heinrich von Kleist

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

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