Top 90 Bernhard Schlink Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I wanted to pose myself both tasks – understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.”

— Bernhard Schlink

52. “There’s this old saying that, if you aren’t particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don’t want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don’t know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I’ve never regretted it.”

— Bernhard Schlink

53. “Goethe’s poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames.”

— Bernhard Schlink

54. “Or was it a question of how the laws were actually interpreted and enforced at the time they committed their crimes, and that they were not applied to them? 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

55. “I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people’s views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves.”

— Bernhard Schlink

56. “Imagine someone is racing intentionally towards his own destruction and you can save him – do you go ahead and save him?”

— Bernhard Schlink

57. “Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I never can be.”

— Bernhard Schlink

58. “I thought that if the right time gets missed, if one has refused or been refused something for too long, it’s too late, even if it is finally tackled with energy and received with joy.”

— Bernhard Schlink

59. “We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have. I had to be content with that.”

— Bernhard Schlink

60. “Sometimes I had the feeling that all of us in his family were like pets to him. The dog you take for a walk, the cat you play with and that curls up in your lap, purring, to be stroked – you can be fond of them, you can even need them to a certain extent, and nonetheless the whole thing – buying pet food, cleaning up the cat box, and trips to the vet – is really too much. Your life is elsewhere.”

— Bernhard Schlink

61. “As I looked and looked, the living face became visible in the dead, the young in the old. This is what must happen to old married couples, I thought: the young man is preserved in the old one for her, the beauty and grace of the young woman stay fresh in the old one for him.”

— Bernhard Schlink

62. “In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched; I saw myself functioning at the university, with my parents and brother and sister and my friends, but inwardly I felt no involvement.”

— Bernhard Schlink

63. “But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her.”

— Bernhard Schlink

64. “In spite of the fact that she pushed me away again and again, and again and again I crawled to her.”

— Bernhard Schlink

65. “La historia no es el pasado tal como fue realmente, sino la forma que le damos.”

— Bernhard Schlink

66. “Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do.”

— Bernhard Schlink

67. “Bravery is good when the cause is good.”

— Bernhard Schlink

68. “Piensa lo que quieras. Soy yo quien cuenta la historia.”

— Bernhard Schlink

69. “History is not the past as it really was. It’s the shape we give it.”

— Bernhard Schlink

70. “There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one must distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb.”

— Bernhard Schlink

71. “What do you want now? Your whole life in one hour?”

— Bernhard Schlink

72. “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?”

— Bernhard Schlink

73. “But waking from a bad dream does not necessarily console you. It can also make you fully aware of the horror you just dreamed, and even of the truth residing in that horror.”

— Bernhard Schlink

74. “Now escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere. And the past I arrived in as a legal historian was no less alive than the present. It is also not true, as outsiders might assume, that one can merely observe the richness of life in the past, whereas one can participate in the present. 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

75. “But books read aloud also stayed long in my memory.”

— Bernhard Schlink

76. “I don’t know where I found the courage to go back to Frau Schmitz. Did my moral upbringing somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing – then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn’t stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.”

— Bernhard Schlink

77. “I moved through the world as if it had nothing to do with me nor I with it.”

— Bernhard Schlink

78. “WHY DOES it make me so sad when I think back to that time? Is it yearning for past happiness – for I was happy in the weeks that followed, in which I really did work like a lunatic and passed the class, and we made love as if nothing else in the world mattered.”

— Bernhard Schlink

79. “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.”

— Bernhard Schlink

80. “I had the feeling she could only be what she was to me at an actual distance.”

— Bernhard Schlink

81. “Nothing weighed heavily.”

— Bernhard Schlink

82. “I gave her the silk nightgown. It was aubergine-colored with narrow straps that left her shoulders and arms bare, and came down to her ankles. It shone and shimmered. Hanna was delighted; she laughed and beamed. She looked down at herself, turned around, danced a few steps, looked at herself in the mirror, checked her reflection, and danced some more. That too is a picture of Hanna that has stayed with me.”

— Bernhard Schlink

83. “I was astonished at how much older literature can actually be read as if it were contemporary.”

— Bernhard Schlink

84. “Goethe’s poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames” or “Lenz must write on a typewriter.”

— Bernhard Schlink

85. “I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account.”

— Bernhard Schlink

86. “But I remember the Sundays. The days in court gave me a new hunger for the colors and smells of nature.”

— Bernhard Schlink

87. “We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have. I had to be content with that. Wanting more, even wanting to know more, was presumption on my part. If we were particularly happy with each other and I asked her something because at that moment it felt as if everything was possible and allowed, then she sometimes ducked my questions, instead of refusing outright to answer them.”

— Bernhard Schlink

88. “He was a professor of philosophy, and thinking was his life – thinking and reading and writing and teaching.”

— Bernhard Schlink

89. “I saw the expectation in her face, saw it light up with joy when she recognized me, watched her eyes scan my face as I approached, saw them seek, inquire, then look uncertain and hurt, and saw the light go out of her face.”

— Bernhard Schlink

90. “I was sitting in the same place I always sat. But she looked straight ahead and through everything. A proud, wounded, lost, and infinitely tired look. A look that wished to see nothing and no one.”

— Bernhard Schlink

91. “I had met Hanna again on the benches as an old woman. She had looked like an old woman and smelled like an old woman. I hadn’t noticed her voice at all. Her voice had stayed young.”

— Bernhard Schlink

92. “It was a cold autumn day with a cloudless, hazy sky and a yellow sun that no longer gave off any heat, the kind you can look at directly without hurting your eyes.”

— Bernhard Schlink

93. “A newspaper photograph showed an older man and a younger man, both in dark suits, shaking hands. In the young one, bowing to the older one, I recognized myself. I was graduating from school, and was getting a prize from the principal at the ceremony. That was a long time after Hanna had left the city.”

— Bernhard Schlink

94. “This is what must happen to old married couples, I thought: the young man is preserved in the old one for her, the beauty and grace of the young woman stay fresh in the old one for him.”

— Bernhard Schlink

95. “But she did not notice that her insistence annoyed the presiding judge. She had no sense of context, of the rules of the game, of the formulas by which her statements and those of the others were toted up into guilt and innocence, conviction and acquittal. To compensate for her defective grasp of the situation, her lawyer would have had to have more experience and self-confidence, or simply to have been better.”

— Bernhard Schlink

96. “The air was cool, and filled with the twittering of birds. Above the mountains the pale sky shone pink.”

— Bernhard Schlink

97. “I had seen her crying. The Hanna who could cry was closer to me than the Hanna who was only strong.”

— Bernhard Schlink

98. “Years later it occurred to me that the reason I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her was not just her body, but the way she held herself and moved.”

— Bernhard Schlink