“Ivan Petrovich returned to Russia an Anglomaniac. With his hair cut short, the starched frill on his shirt-front, the pea-green frock-coat with its multitude of collars, a sour expression on his face, something both brusque and negligent in his manner, the pronunciation of words through his teeth, a sudden wooden laugh, lack of smiles, exclusively political and politico-economic talk, a passion for underdone roast-beef and port wine—everything about him literally reeked of Great Britain; he seemed to be entirely saturated in its spirit.”

—Chapter X (tr. Richard Freeborn)

“The Hergesells suffered under the atmosphere they were obliged to live in at Erkner. But they told themselves and each other that it didn’t concern them and that nothing could happen to them, as they were doing nothing against the State. “Thoughts are free,” they said — but they ought to have known that in this State not even thoughts were free. So, increasingly, they took refuge in their happiness as husband and wife. They were like a pair of lovers clasped together in a flood, with waves and currents, collapsing houses and the bloated corpses of cattle all around them, still believing they would escape the general devastation if they only stuck together. They had failed to understand that there was no such thing as private life in wartime Germany. No amount of reticence could change the fact that every individual German belonged to the generality of Germans and must share in the general destiny of Germany, even as more and more bombs were falling on the just and unjust alike.”

—Narrator

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”

—Narrator

“Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that’s why. They’re nice and creamy. And sort of grainy at the same time.”

—Sheep man

“At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness. And any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.”

—boy

“Not even in a world of miracles, and only if the world is yours alone, can you pray the past away.”

—Renata Adler

“I guess I’ve been high maintenance in just this sense: that you’ve given me more time, on those rides, business travels, visits in the interstices of your life, than you ever planned to give. What you’ve done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part.”

—Renata Adler

“And there it is. Because if these were not failures of love, on your part or on mine, or failures of generosity, or at least of imagination or attention, well, of course, they were, and I didn’t want to know. And though I know my heart cannot have been broken in these things, these things of my house and of yours, no, it can’t have been, I’m sure it was not, I find that I am crying as I write, because, it cannot either, can it? have cost so much to say in some of these things, or in some others sometime, not grudgingly, and without reluctance, Yes.”

—Renata Adler

“Look, the sun is a sort of bribe, you know, and so is a heavy thunderstorm or a snowfall. So is a dawn, though not I think a sunset. So is a warm bath or a shower, and a sound sleep. Bribes all, in the conspiracy of everything to continue to exist.”

—Renata Adler