Go, Went, Gone

by Jenny Erpenbeck

there’s no better way to make history disappear than to unleash money, money roaming free has a worse bite than an attack dog, it can effortlessly bite an entire building out of existence,

Brecht: He who laughs has not yet received the terrible news.

Learning to stop wanting things is probably one of the most difficult lessons of getting old. But if you don’t learn to do that, it seems to him, your desires will be like a bellyful of stones dragging you down into your grave.

Admitting that you don’t know how to write strikes Richard as no less intimate than taking off one’s clothes at the doctor’s.

Time does something to a person, because a human being isn’t a machine that can be switched on and off. The time during which a person doesn’t know how his life can become a life fills a person condemned to idleness from his head down to his toes.

Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go?

the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.