Billiards at Half-Past Nine Quotes

“Feelings can kill such good hard things as love and hate.”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

“... Obviously you're all quite used to the faces. But I'm beginning to wish I were back among my poor old harmless lunatics. Are you all blind, then? So easily fooled? Don't you see they'd kill you all for less than a gesture, for less than a sandwich? You needn't even be dark-haired or blond anymore, or show your grandmother's birth certificate. They'd kill you if they just didn't like your faces. Didn't you see the posters on the wall? Are you blind? You just don't know anymore where you are ... Respectable, respectable. I'm scared, old man-- I've never felt such a stranger among people, not even in 1935 and not in 1942. Maybe I do need time, but even centuries wouldn't be enough to get me used to their faces. Respectable, respectable, without a trace of grief. What's a human being without grief?”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

“ - Хочешь, я сделаю тебя агнцем божьим в моей новой религии? Ты будешь знаменит и богат, они падут пред тобой ниц в ещё более шикарных отелях, чем этот. Ты, видно, новичок и плохо знаешь людей - их скуку можно разогнать только какой-нибудь новой религией, и чем глупее, тем лучше, - нет, убирайся, ты слишком глуп”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

“The new government decided the best way to rectify this was to outlaw abortion and prohibit the sale or display of contraceptives in the Weimar constitution of 1919. During a time of unimaginable scarcity and fear, women were forced into motherhood. They were forced to make do, and the pressure to repopulate the nation, to birth and raise a new generation of mothers and soldiers, was enormous. It was the most important thing a woman could possibly do: Be the Good Mother.”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

“... No, I think I just wanted to laugh at them and tell them at the end: it wasn't really serious.”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

“And, before long, he'd got fat and his stall was decked out with chrome and plate glass, and glittering automats had been installed. Getting hog-fat on pfennigs, getting bossy though only a few months before he'd been forced to obsequiously lower the price of a lemonade by two pfennigs, meanwhile whispering anxiously, 'But don't tell anyone else.'
No feelings would come to him as he went rocking on in No. 11 through the old town, the new town, past allotment gardens and gravel pits to Blessenfeld. He had heard the names of the stops four thousand times: Boisserée Street, North Park, Bleisscher Station, Inner Ring. They sounded strange, the names, as if out of dreams which others had dreamed and vainly tried to let him share; they sounded like calls for help in a heavy fog, while the almost empty streetcar went on toward the end of the line in the afternoon summer sun.”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

“I'll give that boy the farm Heinrich couldn't take. Write me his name and address on a coaster. All the most important messages are sent on beer mats...”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

“Feelings can even kill such good hard things as love and hate.”
― Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine