Katrin Schumann > Quotes

“She’d started to understand there was a chasm between how people saw their lives, how they wanted others to see them, and how they really were. A chasm that was too deep and dark to explore.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“It turns out that no one believes her anyway, and that lack of belief in her festers, infects her through and through—because, in her heart, she wants to be an honest person, and she thought she was. But she is not fully honest with anyone, not even with herself. It turns out she cannot give voice to uncertainty; this is not allowed. She does not need to be told this to know it is true. So she becomes quiet; she continues her journey inward, a journey she will be on for years, alone, unable to share with anyone, not her family, not her friends, not her lover.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“But she had not been tempted to look him up back then. She’d become accustomed to the sense of herself as separate from all others, and there was something comforting about that. It was best to keep the past just out of reach, hovering a little more than arm’s length away. While she knew it was there, could sense it, she carefully kept those memories out of her grasp, and she sometimes seemed to forget the past entirely. But that was an illusion. Her memories of Jack, of Lulu—of life before—were not actually gone and forgotten; they lived on inside her, shadows of a bleached-out stain.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“feelings were not facts, memories lied, and people were not who you thought they were.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“She understood then that she was truly alone inside herself, as were all human beings on earth.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“She yearns for the simplicity of a love that is requited and uncontested, a love that sings as unfettered as a note from a violin. But the realities of the world do not allow for this.”
― Katrin Schumann, This Terrible Beauty

“Too often, people who suffered trauma let themselves be defined by it, and she has been determined to avoid that fate.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“All these years into this interminable war, she is struck by the notion that human life is not only fleeting—a mere blink of an eye—but essentially meaningless, snatched away for no reason and given for no reason.”
― Katrin Schumann, This Terrible Beauty

“Everything we choose to do has consequences. And people do not change unless they want to change. They show us their colors; we just don’t see them.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“Silence isn’t always empty, is it?”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“People thought whatever they thought. There was no changing people’s minds now.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“You could never truly be objective or dispassionate; your biases would always drive the way you saw reality and expressed facts.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“promising pellucid shine: she knows exactly what she”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“It was astonishing how you could be telling the truth and lying at the very same time.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“She was looking for something that was already right in front of her: a solid mass, something concrete, not ephemeral. A person whose quiet forward motion created a place for her—not to hide in but to be safe enough so she could become herself again.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“An education that does not awaken the youth to a sense of conscience and personal moral responsibility is not worthy of that name. —Eduard Spranger, 1947.”
― Katrin Schumann, This Terrible Beauty

“This was not art; this was life. Real life, beautiful and ugly in equal measure.”
― Katrin Schumann, This Terrible Beauty

“Most often in the summertime, she’s holed up somewhere with a book, sometimes not saying more than a few words in a whole day. Give her a few glasses of wine, and she turns into Petula Clark.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“revealing not that the individual was powerless but that he was powerful. That no matter what befell him, his spirit could not be crushed if he refused to let it be. It was magical, astounding; the narrator stands at the edge of a cliff, staring down into the roiling waters, and his heart soars with joy: like a gull gliding on the currents of the wind. Joy at having loved and having been loved. At having lost. Joy at the very fact of his existence.”
― Katrin Schumann, This Terrible Beauty

“In that instant she saw that the dreams she’d had of this man were misplaced. Those memories of the time they’d shared as kids had assumed a significance, a kind of bloated purity, that was all out of proportion with reality; they had been sweet moments she could hang on to, promises of how life could have been. But it wasn’t real.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“The camera is a friend,” Bettina was saying to the crowd. “A reliable friend at all times. It allows you to be in dialogue, to observe, yes, but also to communicate.”
― Katrin Schumann, This Terrible Beauty

“inside there raged a blood-soaked battle between what she wanted, what she deserved, and what she could actually have.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“Time seems immense; it is seconds and minutes and hours; it accumulates, heals, and hurts.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“Her anger lurks, voracious and annihilating, behind the door she has slammed shut, and she cannot risk letting it out.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“Her father approached life as though it had been designed with his entertainment in mind, while it was the opposite for other adults, who were compelled to accommodate him.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“She looks down at her bleeding cuticles, the dry, ragged skin of her fingertips, and she says what she believes to be true: nothing escaped her. It turns out that no one believes her anyway, and that lack of belief in her festers, infects her through and through—because, in her heart, she wants to be an honest person, and she thought she was. But she is not fully honest with anyone, not even with herself. It turns out she cannot give voice to uncertainty; this is not allowed. She does not need to be told this to know it is true. So she becomes quiet; she continues her journey inward, a journey she will be on for years, alone, unable to share with anyone, not her family, not her friends, not her lover.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“She had always assumed that real love was about feeling no fear.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“They each drank two enormous glasses of water in the kitchen, their gulps loud and vulnerable”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“Reading that book made her understand that there were no exceptions to the rule: human beings were always compelled to bring their own agenda to any endeavor.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours