Not a Novel Quotes

“There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces

“There was suddenly a lot of talk of freedom, but I couldn't make much of this word freedom, which floated freely in all sorts of sentences. Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (But what if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we're finished shopping?) Freedom wasn't given freely, it came at a price, and the price was my entire life up to that point. The price was that everything that had been called the present until then was now called the past.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces

“An empty space is a space for questions, not for answers. And what we don't know is infinite.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces

“Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves—a fact that’s hard to grasp. We know that time also separates us from circumstances that might have turned us into very different people.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces