Top 90 Bernhard Schlink Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.”

— Bernhard Schlink

2. “Now to escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere.”

— Bernhard Schlink

3. “The more I suffer, the more I love.”

— Bernhard Schlink

4. “You don’t have the power to upset me. You don’t matter enough to upset me.”

— Bernhard Schlink

5. “It wasn’t that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It’s there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?”

— Bernhard Schlink

6. “What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?”

— Bernhard Schlink

7. “When we open ourselves you yourself to me and I myself to you, when we submerge you into me and I into you when we vanish into me you and into you I Then am I me and you are you.”

— Bernhard Schlink

8. “The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.”

— Bernhard Schlink

9. “Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?”

— Bernhard Schlink

10. “What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”

— Bernhard Schlink

11. “The truth of what one says lies in what one does.”

— Bernhard Schlink

12. “The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?”

— Bernhard Schlink

13. “When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.”

— Bernhard Schlink

14. “Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.”

— Bernhard Schlink

15. “In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled freshed, freshly washed or of freshed laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved.”

— Bernhard Schlink

16. “As an author, you can’t expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that’s what you hope for, you shouldn’t sell the rights.”

— Bernhard Schlink

17. “I did not know that children think the hard questions they ask are easy and thus expect easy answers to them, and that they are disappointed when they get cautious, complex answers.”

— Bernhard Schlink

18. “I felt a great emptiness inside, as if I had been searching for some glimpse, not outside but within myself, and had discovered that there was nothing to be found.”

— Bernhard Schlink

19. “But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive – a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breast and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body.”

— Bernhard Schlink

20. “The past has to be remembered, so that it’s never repeated.”

— Bernhard Schlink

21. “Ich schreibe aus demselben Grund, aus dem andere lesen: Man will nicht nur ein Leben leben.”

— Bernhard Schlink

22. “Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.”

— Bernhard Schlink

23. “She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn’t do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats.”

— Bernhard Schlink

24. “Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily...”

— Bernhard Schlink

25. “Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides.”

— Bernhard Schlink

26. “People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy. But they aren’t and it is one of the experiences of life.”

— Bernhard Schlink

27. “Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?”

— Bernhard Schlink

28. “Which animal do you see when you hold me and close your eyes and think of animals?”

— Bernhard Schlink

29. “I can’t say I’m thankful about being German because I sometimes experience it as a huge burden. But it is an integral part of me and I wouldn’t want to escape it. I have accepted it.”

— Bernhard Schlink

30. “We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst.”

— Bernhard Schlink

31. “I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.”

— Bernhard Schlink

32. “As a citizen and someone who was a judge on the constitutional law court for 18 years, I feel whenever I can raise my voice with the hope of being heard I need to do it, but I wouldn’t assign a special wisdom and responsibility to writers.”

— Bernhard Schlink

33. “Philosophy has forgotten about children.”

— Bernhard Schlink

34. “So I was still guilty. And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal.”

— Bernhard Schlink

35. “I took all the blame. I admitted mistakes I hadn’t made, intentions I’d never had. Whenever she turned cold and hard, I begged her to be good to me again, to forgive me and love me. Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. Sometimes I thought she just bullied me. But either way, I had no choice.”

— Bernhard Schlink

36. “Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?”

— Bernhard Schlink

37. “But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one’s self-righteousness?”

— Bernhard Schlink

38. “We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?”

— Bernhard Schlink

39. “But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.”

— Bernhard Schlink

40. “Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success... whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood.”

— Bernhard Schlink

41. “Berg, Sophia may be a Greek name, but that is no reason for you to study your neighbor in a Greek lesson. Translate!”

— Bernhard Schlink

42. “I could never stop comparing the way it was with Gertrud and the way it had been with Hanna; again and again, Gertrud and I would hold each other, and I would feel that something was wrong, that she was wrong, that she moved wrong and felt wrong, smelled wrong and tasted wrong. I thought I would get over it. I hoped it would go away. I wanted to be free of Hanna. But I never got over the feeling that something was wrong.”

— Bernhard Schlink

43. “Or is there no such thing as ‘too late’? Is there only ‘late’ and is ‘late’ always better than ‘never’? I don’t know.”

— Bernhard Schlink

44. “It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death.”

— Bernhard Schlink

45. “I know that disavowal is an unusal form of betrayal. From the outside it is impossible to tell if you are disowning someone or simply exercising discretion, being considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what you’re doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal.”

— Bernhard Schlink

46. “But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.”

— Bernhard Schlink

47. “It was more dangerous not to go; I was running the risk of becoming trapped in my own fantasies. So I was doing the right thing by going. She would behave normally, I would behave normally, and everything would be normal again.”

— Bernhard Schlink

48. “Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?”

— Bernhard Schlink

49. “The value of being brave, working hard, saving money keeping order depends on what it’s for.”

— Bernhard Schlink

50. “I certainly know German colleagues in the US who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I’ve never tried that.”

— Bernhard Schlink