Transit Anna Seghers Quotes

What can I expect here? You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don’t you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: ‘What do you think you’re waiting for? You’ve been in Hell for a long time already.

When you're young and healthy you can recover quickly from a defeat. But betrayal is different—it paralyzes you.

For the first time back then, I thought about everything seriously. The past and the future, both equally unknowable, and also this ongoing situation that the consulates call "transitory" but that we know in everyday language as "the present.

Even if they were to shoot me, they'd never be able to eradicate me. I feel I know this country, its work, its people, its hills and mountains, its peaches and its grapes too well. If you bleed to death on familiar soil, something of you will continue to grow like the sprouts that come up after bushes and trees have been cut down.

Um das zu sehen, worauf es ankommt, muss man bleiben wollen. Unmerklich verhüllten sich alle Städte für die, die sie nur zum Durchziehen brauchen.

Es ist mir ohnehin zutiefst unverständlich, was verheiratete oder glücklich liebende Leute auf einem Tanzfest oder in einer Diskothek suchen, wo der ganze Reiz solcher Veranstaltungen doch ausschließlich darin besteht, daß man nicht weiß, in wessen Gesellschaft man sie verlassen wird oder ob die Jagd ergebnislos bleibt.

Such lies were a lot better, less hurtful than the truth would have been.

Then I walked down the Cours Belsunce. The nets were stretched out to dry. A couple of women mending them looked quite lost in the huge square. I had never seen them doing this before. I'm sure that I haven't seen most of the really important things that happen in this city. To see the things that matter, you have to feel that you want to stay. Cities shroud themselves from those who're just passing through. I picked my way carefully among the nets. The first stores were just opening, and the first newspaper boys were yelling the headlines. The newspaper boys, the fishermen's wives on the Belsunce, the shopkeepers opening their stores, the workers going to work the early shift - they were all part of the masses who would never leave no matter what happened. The thought of leaving this place was as unlikely to occur to them as to a tree or a clump of grass.