Wall Flower Quotes

“I hadn’t succeeded in sacrificing myself for the greater good. I had retained some small bit of my own integrity, and I was at last happy about that.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“That our love had no future other than the moment in which it happened was the root of our passion, which erupted again and again. That each night of our love could be the last accounted for its ecstasy. Forlornness was the soil in which our love grew, and we were thoroughly in agreement about this condition. We were displaced persons. We knew that the life that had once existed elsewhere could never again be. There could thus be no going back but also no going forward. Forward and back was the moment in which we loved each other.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“I had emigrated to my study. Here was my niche, which I sought to seal off. This is where I would soon become a master of my craft. I invented a hideout within a hideout; in everything I did I found another hideout. I went away without ever having changed my location. Once more, I was not living in the world that surrounded me, I lived in the novel that I had begun to write. In its characters, I tried to encounter myself. I invented life in order to distance myself from life “out there.” I pursued a new escape route after I had abandoned the transcendental heights. This was the route back into an artistic existence. Here I could fall back on my experiences. Here, once again, I was only somewhat the creator of my own circumstances.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“I had understood that our knowledge is primarily a practised ritual that serves to conceal our speechlessness in the face of the real. I had learned that the more clearly we construct our sentences, the less we understand about what actually has happened or is still happening.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“In my head, I had learned to survive. I had learned to provide answers to every question and construct universal propositions, that is statements that are correct from front to back and from back to front, which could enjoy the acclaim of professionals in the field. I had learned to conceal myself behind rational sentences. I had learned to speak the universal language. Out of my own fear of fear, I had become a specialist in the universal. By my own choice, I reduced myself to the bare essentials, the necessary generalities. Indeed, the world was remote. No shouting. No thorn bush that burned. No small light. No voice against another voice. The law of the world lay silently over everything so that I myself seemed innocent of my well-knit lies. I have lived extremely far away from myself and learned to lie as part of the collective. I have tried out the cynic’s way of life and could not endure it. Ultimately I understood that I could not outwit the circumstances, even using the cunning of reason.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“In my head, I had learned to survive. I had learned to provide answers to every question and construct universal propositions, that is statements that are correct from front to back and from back to front, which could enjoy the acclaim of professionals in the field. I had learned to conceal myself behind rational sentences. I had learned to speak the universal language. Out of my own fear of fear, I had become a specialist in the universal. By my own choice, I reduced myself to the bare essentials, the necessary generalities. Indeed, the world was remote. No shouting. No thorn bush that burned. No small light. No voice against another voice. The law of the world lay silently over everything so that I myself seemed innocent of my well-knit lies.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“She said she found my book to be really good and even intelligible.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“Reni had a tendency towards brilliant completeness, towards perfection; for that reason, she never finished any project, for something was always missing, and in that regard she was again usually correct.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“Soon I learned how to play the piano everywhere, whether on the streetcar or during gym class. I practised my fingerings on the pavement and on window panes, on the desks at school or in Father’s favourite bars. But was I playing or was the music playing within me? That too was something I could never say with certainty.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border

“Among the most important words of my childhood were “friend” and “foe,” though people talked about the foe more than the friend.”
― Rita Kuczynski, Wall Flower: A Life on the German Border