The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink

What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?

“Look at the defendants—you won’t find a single one who really believes he had the dispensation to murder back then.”

We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion,

I wanted to pose myself both tasks—understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.

Parental expectations, from which every generation must free itself, were nullified by the fact that these parents had failed to measure up during the Third Reich, or after it ended.

the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation,

There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.