Jenny Erpenbeck Quotes

“Home. When it rains, you can smell the leaves in the forest and the sand. It's all so small and mild, the landscape surrounding the lake, so manageable. The leaves and the sand are so close, it's as if you might, if you wanted, pull them on over your head. And the lake always laps at the shore so gently, licking the hand you dip into it like a young dog, and the water is soft and shallow.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“It would be lovely if he and his wife would succeed in dying before the matter of inherited property was finally settled. Then the person giving the speech at the funeral would be able to say that until the very end they had been able to pursue what they loved: sailing. [p. 121]”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“But with each step you take while fleeing, your baggage grows less and less, with more and more left behind, and sooner or later you just stop and sit there, and then all that is left of life is life itself, and everything else is lying in all the ditches beside all the roads in a land as enormous as the air, and surely here as well you can find those dandelions, these larks.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“Which means that in the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“... when he slipped out of his mother's womb, he was already filled with interior spaces that didn't belong to him, and he can't just look inside to inspect his own interior.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5m long, 3.8m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“Everything had kept getting less, they'd had to leave behind more and more baggage, or else it was taken from them, as though they were now too weak to carry all those things that are part of life, as though someone were trying to force them into old age by relieving them of all this.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“Her body is a city. Her heart is a large shady square, her fingers pedestrians, her hair the light of streetlamps, her knees two rows of buildings. She tries to give people footpaths. She tries to open up her cheeks and her towers. She didn't know streets hurt so much, not that there were so many streets in her to begin with. She wants to take her body on a stroll, out of her body, but she doesn't know where the key is.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

Adventure is really always just subjecting yourself to something unfamiliar

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“My fear of the future, she says, has not yet failed.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, her grandmother said to her at the edge of the grave. But that wasn't right, because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“Nothing is nicer than diving with your eyes open. Diving down as far as the shimmering legs of your mother and father who have just come back from swimming and now are wading to shore through the shallow water. Nothing more fun than to tickle them and to hear, muffled by the water, how they shriek because they know it will make their child happy.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“Sometimes the price one pays for something continues to grow after the fact,becoming too expensive long after it has been paid.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“The end of a day on which a life has ended is still far from being the end of days.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“Is that suppose to console me?
Yes.
So now you also want to rob me of the days I was happy.
I'm just saying: You never had as much as you imagine you're losing now.
Do you think I'd feel better if I saw things that way?
That's what I'm hoping for.
So then I'd just put on my apron again and remind myself how much a herring weighs compared to three apples.
At least with herring and apples you know where you stand.
It's obviously been a long time since you loved someone.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck

How much better it would be, she thinks, if the world were ruled by chance and not a God.

— Jenny Erpenbeck

“A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck