Tyll

by Daniel Kehlmann

The war had not yet come to us. We lived in fear and hope and tried not to draw God’s wrath down upon our securely walled town, with its hundred and five houses and the church and the cemetery, where our ancestors waited for the Day of Resurrection.

It occurs to him that his mother could come back. If she died on the way home, she could suddenly appear. She could brush past him, whisper something to him, show him her transformed face. The thought makes his blood run cold. Is it really possible to have just a second ago loved a person, but the next moment to die of fright when this person comes back?

life simply leads you somewhere or other—if you weren’t here, you would be elsewhere, and everything would be just as strange.

What really troubles him, however, is the question of whether a person will go to hell for stealing so many books. But you must simply snatch knowledge wherever it can be found. People are not meant to languish in ignorance.

Memory is a peculiar thing: it doesn’t simply come and go as it pleases; rather you can light it and extinguish it again like a pitchwood torch.

You know, I didn’t choose this. I am what I am because my father was what he was. And he was what he was because of his father. And my son will have to be what I am, for a hangman’s son becomes a hangman.”

Girls don’t go to other places. They stay where they were born. So it has always been: you’re little, you help in the house; you get bigger, you help the female hands; you grow up and marry a Steger son, if you’re pretty, or else a relative of the smith or, if things go badly, a Heinerling. Then you have a child and another child and more children, most of whom die, and you continue to help the hands and in church sit somewhat farther toward the front, next to your husband and behind your mother-in-law, and then, when you’re forty and your bones ache and your teeth are gone, you sit in your mother-in-law’s old seat.

There are only a few moments when two things are possible, one path as much as another. Only a few moments when you can decide.

The nature of marriage consisted not only in the fact that you had children, it also consisted of all the wounds you had inflicted on each other, all the mistakes you had made together, all the things you held against each other forever.

a dragon that let itself be sighted would be recognized a priori as a dragon that is no real dragon.” Olearius rubbed his forehead. “In this region, evidently, a dragon has never before been witnessed. Hence I am confident that there must be one here.”

“Are you offering me charity, little Liz? A daily soup and a thick blanket and warm slippers until I die in my bed?” “That’s not so bad.” “But do you know what’s better? Even better than dying in one’s bed?” “Tell me.” “Not dying, little Liz. That is much better.”