Repetition Quotes

“What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurring, but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered, I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly I look on memory as more than haphazard thinking back - as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention.”
― Peter Handke, Repetition

“When he drew on his cigarette, his face, as familiar as it was uncanny, stood out for a moment, and again, as in the bus, I saw his searching eyes. But I thought of the eyes of a researcher who doesn't want to discover anything but wants, rather, to make something unknown, to pace off and enlarge the realm of the unknown.”
― Peter Handke; Ralph Manheim [trans, Repetition

“It was chiefly his ears that expressed the young man's ability to keep track of the present along with the absent. While registering every sound in the moving bus, they were equally aware of the glacier that was calving at the same time, of the blind feeling their way in the cities of every continent, or of the brook flowing now as always through his native village.”
― Peter Handke; Ralph Manheim [trans, Repetition

“Sometimes, in looking at me, her face froze into an expression of pity without a glimmer of compassion. I had often been characterized by someone – a priest, a teacher, a girl, a classmate; but in that silent look of my mother's I felt not only characterized but seen through and condemned [...] And when for the first time, after all the years at the seminary, where no one called us by anything but our family names, I heard the girl next to me at the state school address me quite casually by my first name, I took it as a characterization that exonerated me, almost as a caress. I had a feeling of relief and I can still see the sparkle of the girl's hair. And so, once I learned to decipher my mother's looks, I knew: This is no place for me.”
― Peter Handke; Ralph Manheim [trans, Repetition