Ingeborg Bachmann Quotes

As it was all was lost. He was alive, yes, he was alive, he felt this for the first time. But he knew now that he was living in a prison, that he had to make the best of it in there and would soon rage and would have to speak this thieves' cant, the only language at his disposal, in order not to be so abandoned.

A single tear forms, just in the corner of one eye, but it doesn't roll down my cheek; it merely crystallizes in the cold air, it grows and grows into a second giant globe that doesn't want to orbit with the world—it breaks off from the planet and plunges into infinity.

...the simple task of getting dressed and undressed was a real strain, but nothing could compare with her addiction to deep sleep...

My favorite, how did you put it now? Landscapes, animals, plants? Favorite what? Books, music, architecture, painting? I don't have any favorite animals, no favorite mosquitoes, favorite beetles, favorite worms, even with the best will in the world I cannot tell you which birds or fish or predators I prefer, it would also be difficult for me to have to choose much more generally.

I'll worship animals in the night, I'll lay violent hands on the holiest icons, I'll clutch at all lies, I'll grow bestial in my dreams and will allow myself to be slaughtered like a beast.

But Beatrix knew very well that there were no jobs, not even the most pitiful office routine - she wasn't even qualified for that - and that no one would allow her to sleep until late in the afternoon because these ill-advised people all around her let themselves be squeezed into schedules; that she would never work, least of all learn a trade, because she had no ambition whatsoever to earn a single shilling, become self-supporting and spend eight hours a day with people who smelled bad.

No new world without a new language.

There are people who think that Malina and I are married. We never considered that we might be married, that such a possibility could exist, nor even the idea that other people might think that we were married. For the longest time it never crossed our minds that, like other people, we appear as man and wife wherever we go. This was a complete surprise for us, but we had no idea what to make of it. We laughed a lot.

For the facts that make up the world need the non-factual as a vantage point from which to be perceived.

The children are in love but do not know with what. They talk in gibberish, muse themselves into an indefinable pallor, and when they are completely at a loss they invent a language that maddens them. My fish. My hook. My fox. My snare. My fire. You my water. You my current. My earth. You my if. And you my but. Either. Or. My everything...my everything...They push one another, go for each other with their fists and scuffle over a counter-word that doesn't exist.

With the aid of a minute correction - that of the dispersing lens - in a gold frame perched on her nose, Miranda can see into hell.

Elisabeth had not had her future and her parents had not had theirs, there was nothing to this so-called future which was always promised to the young.

...we take care not to touch each other in public, nor do we look into each other's eyes except furtively, because Ivan must first wash my eyes with his own, removing the images which landed on my retina before his arrival.

You wouldn't believe it, but apart from a few drunks, a few sex murderers and other men who get into the papers where they are designated as criminals of passion, no normal man with normal drives has the obvious idea that a normal woman would like to be quite normally raped. Part of it is that men aren't normal, but people are incapable of even imagining all the ramifications of the male disease, so accustomed have they become to men's mistakes in judgment and their phenomenal lack of instinct.

The facts that make the world real-- these depend on the unreal in order to be recognised by it.

Miranda doesn't dream, she simply rests. When Miranda's eyes are at ease, her mind is at peace.