A Guide to Berlin Quotes

“snow had wondrously returned. It pleased her to see anew the draped quality in the air, the muslin white descending, the animation, the plenitude. The symbol suggested itself – that there might be a white-washing now, and a more complete covering over. Snow is consolation, she thought; snow is this padding and cladding, this lush erasure of signs. She was surprised at how rested and serene she felt.”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“It was hard to imagine the icy water thawed and re-sealing, or the sky returning to a lively blue. She had a sense of contraction, of huddling against the weather. Later, it figured in her mind as Stalinist classicism, the wind tunnel of the vast and inhuman Karl-Marx-Allee, and the shapes of people in padded jackets bending against the cruel air. A scene from Eisenstein, perhaps, with a gelid lens and the special effects of monumental vision, swollen by an aerial view and historical misery. Black outlines on white snow, impersonality, extinguishment. Exaggeration of this kind was irresistible. In that early, fierce cold, Berliners coped better.”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“I was employed by an agency. Hikikomori agency. Parents paid the agency to find ways to get their sons back into the world. For many we were what you call in English “the last resort”: the parents had tried pets, Shinto priests, bribes, threats. ‘I was a very good rental sister – I had a high success rate. The fact that I dressed as a goth Lolita helped,”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“Hagi pots are very prized and collected all around the world. There are delicate cups, with a translucent white glaze and there are heavy, lumpish teacups of rough, gritty clay. These have a creamy thick glaze, slightly pink, that has been likened in haiku to a woman’s blushing skin. My father makes the second kind, but secretly I prefer the others, and my vision is always of powdered green tea spinning and spiralling in one of the fine cups. Because the clay is slightly porous, tea stains and recolours the pots as they are used, entering into the crazes and crackles, making the white slowly turn pink.”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“What’s at Oranienplatz?’ Now they moved together from single to communal stories. As they continued moving towards Oranienplatz, Gino explained that it was an occupied space. Refugees from Africa seeking asylum, seeking a warm, safe haven, had built there a shantytown of tents and shelters. There were ramshackle huts, stretched canvas beneath bare trees, there were signs that read: ‘Kein Mensch ist illegal’; ‘Refugees are welcome here; Deportation is murder’. It was a community, said Gino, an ephemeral community.”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“struggling with frozen expressions and tightly compressed lips. Everyone wore black padded jackets in a kind of mournful uniformity, and battled the same bladed wind that swept across the open spaces, their fists jammed into pockets, their heads resolutely down.”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“the dignity and sobriety of old public buildings, their temple facades, would be assaulted and covered over by indiscriminate modernity; that new buildings, more severely efficient, would eventually replace them.”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“Like so much in the centre, it was under construction or reconstruction. Scaffolding, cranes, the temporary business of architects and workmen, the portable toilets, the short-term fencing, the crash-barriers and the skips. Rubble, more rubble. There was a history of Berlin to be written on the topic of rubble.”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“the men she had known at university, with their practised uncouthness, their masculine argumentation, the way they assumed ownership of the women they lassoed into their grasp. She had endured them, her series of clever boyfriends, who expected her to pick up their towels and edit their poor prose. They had all exemplified the modish paranoias of their age. They were conceited over-achievers and smugly privileged. It had been a relief to fly away,”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“She had come to Berlin to write, an ambition as vague as it was hopeful, verified only by her saying so. There was no evidence of her writing, for she had not yet begun. Her torpor would eventually – necessarily – lift. But she was a kind of tourist, after all, and bent on swift amusements. The weather oppressed her. She sensed herself frozen inside. She was like one of the ubiquitous cranes located high on building sites in Mitte, a stiff shape merely, stuck mechanical in mid-air.”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin

“We are all shits, my friends. We are all literary snobs in this vicarious little room of our own, dilettantish, smug, hidden from the fucked-up world. We are enslaved to the folly and the whirlpool of our own obsessions. Where is now rather than our own deeply intoxicating pasts? Where is Lampedusa, where is the tragedy of others? What do we think of a man playing "Nessun Dorma" on a saw in the shadows of a U-station? The lost homeless in Kreuzberg, the drug pushers in Gorlitzer Park, the illegally immigrant prostitutes, freezing their arses at Hackescher Markt? And all the other foreigners, wretched foreigners, who don't have wine and company? Why do we meet for this writer who laments his lost Russia, when losses are everywhere? We adore him because we find some cracked mirror there, we think that words will save us, that a fine description will drag us away from our own disappointments, and offer consolation, or explanation, or the return of a disappeared father. We want to cancel our nothingness with his vigour of incarnation, we want to believe, truly believe, in literary salvation. Who else tells us that a twig reflected in a puddle is worthy of our notice? That it looks like an undeveloped photograph, that it symptomises something inside us, that it reminds us of the entanglements of words and things and reflections; that we must all notice the withering as well as the blossoming; and that immortal gesture is always present and exists inside the world...”
― Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin