The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.

But with adults I see absolutely no justification for setting other people’s views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves.

But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.

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

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.