The German Girl Quotes

“Take a good look at them, Mama. We were a wretched mass of fleeing people who had been kicked out of our homes. In just a few seconds, we had become immigrants, something she never wanted to accept. She had to face reality now. Suddenly”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“We lived on illusions and woke up far too late.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“You need to know where you come from. You need to know how to make peace with the past.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“This time she wasn't facing racial cleansing that aimed to create physical perfection, size and color to achieve purity. Now it was a cleansing of ideas. It was people's minds they were afraid of, not their physical traits. The doubts expressed by a crazy philosopher from her own country whom she used to read flitted through her mind: "Is man God's mistake, or God man's mistake?”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“The pain of loss transforms us.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“I learned that, to survive, it was best to live in the present. On this island, there was no past or future. Your destiny was today.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“The couple's physical decline became increasingly obvious with each passing hour. The old man, immobile in bed; Mrs. Adler, all alone, watching as the love of her life - her great support - slipped away slowly as this ship sailed to the island that was to be our salvation. This was the only answer they could find at an age when all you could hope for was the peace to be able to say good-bye.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“I was almost twelve years old when I decided to kill my parents.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“Don’t cry twice over the same corpse,”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“History was repeating itself. What a lack of imagination, I thought.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“Each morning, I would pull back the red velvet drapes and open the windows to let in the noise of the city. I loved watching people running after trains, the traffic chaos on Unter den Linden. The cold air of Berlin smelled of tulips, candy floss, fresh Pfeffernusse.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“I have no wish to return to the past. Time to end it all: even pain has its expiration date.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“There are moments when it is better to accept it’s all over, that there’s nothing more to be done. Give up and abandon hope: surrender.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“My father wasn’t someone you could question, or even feel jealous about. Not because he wasn’t handsome, but because he didn’t like complications or anything that would disturb his space, which was already well-defined.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“You have to leave islands,” he would always tell Mom. “That’s what you think when the endless sea is your only frontier.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“I was bored at school, where the intention was to make a young lady out of me. We had lessons in dressmaking, cooking, typing, handicrafts, and handwriting. I was known as “the Polack,” and accepted it. I didn’t try to make any friends, because I knew that in the end we would be leaving this island where we had nothing of value to lose. At school there was constant talk of the war, and that was what truly frightened me. Whenever we got mail, I hoped to receive a letter from Papa, but all that came were postcards”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“Aprendí que, para sobrevivir, lo más conveniente era vivir en el presente. En esta isla no hay pasado ni futuro. El destino es hoy.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, La niña alemana

“even pain has its expiration date.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“God had become the new rulers’ main enemy.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“It was people’s minds they were afraid of,”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“On one tomb I read this inscription: “Kind passerby: Absent your mind from the cruel world for a few moments, and dedicate a loving, peaceful thought to these two beings whose earthly happiness was cut short by fate, and whose mortal remains lie at rest in this sepulcher in fulfillment of a sacred promise. We thank you from eternity.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“breathing in the bushy nostrils of old men”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“That at least was some consolation: a death without pain or blood.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“Today was a holiday: the purest man in Germany was fifty.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“La levedad es esencial desde el momento en que uno decide partir.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, La niña alemana

“Ya no quiero volver al pasado. Es necesario ponerle fin: el dolor tiene caducidad.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, La niña alemana

“If you don't have faith and are not willing to forgive, if you don't believe in anything, there's no way that your body and soul will leave together. I haven't got long left. The day I'm struck down, I'll let myself go, and that will be it! What's the point of all that suffering?"...Catalina is a wise old woman.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“I understood we were now left all on our own in a country heading into the unknown and prepared constantly for war. A country ruled by angry military men who had set themselves the task of reinventing history, of telling their own version of it, of changing its course as they saw fit.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“I burst out laughing: Leo was the only person on board who could make me forget the past, because he was so very present.”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl

“We can't spend our lives constantly starting over. A generation goes by, they destroy us. We start over, ad they destroy us again. Is that our fate?”
― Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl