Ingeborg Bachmann > Quotes

“I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“And I don’t believe in this materialism, in this consumer society, in this capitalism, in this outrageous horror that happens / takes place here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it “a day will come.” And one day it will come. Well, probably it won’t come, since they’ve always destroyed it for us…. It won’t come, and I believe in it anyway. Because if I can’t believe in it anymore then I can’t write anymore either.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“speak across borders
even if borders pass through every word.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“No new world without a new language.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories

“I myself am a person who has never resigned myself, who is absolutely never resigned, who can’t imagine it at all. I simply observe, and I observe in so many people, and often very quickly, a resignation that terrifies me, that’s it.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“One could only be nice to each other for a while. That was the best one could do. Men and women should best keep at a safe distance, having nothing to do with each other until both had found their way out of their misunderstanding, their confusion or the disruption of all relationships. One day, something else might come. But only then. Something strong. Something mysterious. Something greater to which everyone could submit.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“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.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“If I had not immersed myself in books, in stories and legends, in newspapers, in reports, if everything communicable had not grown up in me, I should have been a nonentity, a collection of uncomprehended events. (And that might have been a good thing, then I should have thought of something new.) That I can see, that I can hear, are things I do not deserve; but my feelings, those I truly deserve, these herons over white beaches, these wanderers by night, the hungry vagabonds that take my heart as their highroad. I wish I could call out to all those who believe in their unique brains and the hard currency of their thoughts: be of good faith! But these coins which you clink together have been withdrawn from circulation, only you don't know it yet....Admit that when you really pay, with your lives, you do so only beyond the barrier, when you have said farewell to everything that is so dear to you--to landing-places, flying-bases, and only from there do you embark on your own path and your journey from imagined stop to imagined stop, travellers who must not be concerned with arriving.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories

“Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding, and you don't even know which lives came before and which is your life of today, you even mix up your own lives.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“There was only one hope she didn't and wouldn't allow herself to hold on to: that if, in almost thirty years, she hadn't found a man, not a single one, who was exclusively significant for her, who had become inevitable to her, someone who was strong and brought her the mystery she had been waiting for, not a single one who was really a man and not an eccentric, a weakling or one of the needy the world was full of - then the man simply didn't exist, and as long as this New Man did not exist, one could only be friendly and kind to one another, for a while. There was nothing more to make of it, and it would be best if women and men kept their distance and had nothing to do with each other until both had found their way out of the tangle and confusion, the discrepancy inherent in all relationships.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Simultan. Erzählungen

“Our field is the sky,
tilled by the sweat of motors,
in the face of night,
at the risk of our dreams---

…. … … … …
Who lived there? Whose hands were pure?
Who glowed in the night,
A ghost to other ghosts?
Who lives down below? Who cries….
Who has lost the key to their house?
Who can’t find their bed, who is sleeping
on the steps of the stairs? When morning comes, who will
dare interpret the silvery trace: look above me…When the
water pushes the watermill wheel once again,
who will dare remember the night?”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann

“I am a dead man who wanders
registered nowhere”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

“Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is a debauchery, a consuming addiction. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“Aslında kötü bir alışkanlıktır okumak, öteki bütün kötü alışkanlıkların yerini tutabilecek ya da onların yerine herkesi daha bir yoğun biçimde yaşamaya itebilecek bir alışkanlıktır, delicesine bir yaşam biçimidir, insanı yiyip bitiren bir tutkudur. Hayır, uyuşturucu kullanmıyorum, kitapları kullanıyorum...”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“I can no longer see a path in any path.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories

“Bir gün gelecek, insanlar savanları ve bozkırları yeniden keşfedecekler, uçsuz bucaksıza açılıp köleliklerine bir son verecekler, hayvanlar yükseklerdeki güneşin altında insanlara, artık özgür olan insanlara yaklaşacaklar, ve dev kaplumbağalar, filler, bizonlar birlik içersinde yaşayacaklar, ormanların ve çöllerin kralları, özgürlüklerine kavuşmuş insanlarla birleşecekler, aynı kaynaktan su içecekler, arınmış havayı soluyacaklar, birbirlerini parçalamayacaklar, bu, başlangıç olacak; bütün bir yaşamın başlangıcı…”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“What of those loving, accepting, understanding voices? Do you hear them? Or do you only hear what hurts?”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Herzzeit. Briefwechsel

“kimi zaman bana neden içinde her şeyin iyi olacağı ütopik bir ülkeyi, bir ütopya niteliğinde bir dünyayı tasarladığımı sordular. yaşadığımız günlük yaşamın iğrençliği göz önünde tutulduğunda, bu soruyu yanıtlamak bir çelişkiye yol açabilir, çünkü bizler, günümüzde gerçekte hiçbir şeye sahip değiliz. insan, ancak maddi şeylerin ötesinde bir şeylere sahipse zengindir. ve ben bu materyalizme, bu tüketim toplumuna, bu kapitalizme, burada cereyan eden bu korkunçluğa, sırtımızdan yaşamaya hakları olmayan bu insanların zenginleşmesine inanmıyorum. gerçekte inandığım bir şey var, ve ben buna 'bir gün gelecek' diyorum. ve özlemini çektiğim şey, bir gün gelecek. evet, belki de gelmeyecek, ama ben yine de inanıyorum geleceğine. çünkü eğer inanmazsam, artık yazamam.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“Never was there so much magic over things as when you spoke, and never were words so powerful. You could make speech flare up, become muddled or mighty. You did everything with words and sentences, came to an understanding with them or transmuted them, gave things a new name; and objects which understand neither the straight nor the crooked words, almost took their being from your words.

Oh, nobody was ever able to play so well, you monsters! You invented all games, number games and word games, dream games and love games.

Never did anyone speak of himself like that. Almost truthfully. Almost murderously truthfully. Bent over the water, almost abandoned. The world is already dark and I cannot put on the necklace of shells. There will be no clearing. You different from all the others. I am under water. Am under water.

And now someone is walking up above and hates water and hates green and does not understand, will never understand. As I have never understood.

Almost mute,
almost still
hearing
the call.

Come. Just once.
Come.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories

“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“Yaşayacak bir niçin'i bulunan, hemen her nasıla dayanabilir.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“I’ll sleep on my questions in a deep intoxication. 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.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“She wondered all the same how much they really had to say to one another, given that they had only this city in common and a similar way of talking, the same intonation, perhaps she'd just wanted to believe after that third whiskey on the roof garden at the Hilton that he would give her back something she'd lost, a missing taste, an intonation gone flat, that ghostly feeling of home, though she was no longer at home anywhere.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Simultan. Erzählungen

“He would like to burrow under the earth like a bulb, like a root, to where it is still warm. To hibernate with his thoughts and feelings. To remain silent with a shrivelling mouth. He wishes that all the statements, insults, promises he has uttered would become invalid, forgotten by everyone and he himself forgotten too.

But no sooner is he secured in the silence, no sooner does he fancy that he has wrapped himself up like a chrysalis, than he is no longer right. A wet, cold wind blows his absence of expectations around the corner, over a flower-stall filled with evergreens and flowers for the dead. And suddenly he is holding in his hands the snowdrops that he didn't want to buy--he who wanted to go empty-handed! The bells of the snowdrops begin to ring wildly and soundlessly, and he goes to where his ruin awaits him. Filled with expectation as never before, with the expectation and the desire for salvation accumulated through all the years.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories

“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.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories

“And everything stayed unsaid.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“Bir ölüyüm ben, dolaşıp duran
Artık hiçbir yerde kaydım yok.
Bilinmiyorum mülki amirin görev yerinde.
Sayı fazlasıyım altın kentlerde.
Ve yeşeren taşra yörelerinde...

Vazgeçilmişim çoktan,
ve hiçbir şeyle anımsanmamışım.

Yalnızca rüzgarla ve zamanla ve sesle,
ben insanlar arasında yaşayamayan...”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“...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.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“Books? Yes, I read a lot, I’ve always read a lot. No, I’m not sure we do understand each other. I like to read best on the floor, or in bed, almost everything lying down, no, it has less to do with the books, above all it has to do with the reading, with black on white, with the letters, syllables, lines, the signs, the setting down, this inhuman fixing, this insanity, which flows from people and is frozen into expression. Believe me, expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity. It also has to do with turning pages, with hunting from one page to the other, with flight, with complicity in an absurd, solidified effusion, with a vile overflow of verse, with insuring life in a single sentence, and, in turn, with the sentences seeking insurance in life. Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is a debauchery, a consuming addiction. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books, of course I have certain preferences, many books don’t suit me at all, some I take only in the morning, others at night, there are books I don’t ever let go, I drag them around with me in the apartment, carrying them from the living room into the kitchen, I read them in the hall standing up, I don’t use bookmarks, I don’t move my lips while reading, early on I learned to read very well, I don’t remember the method, but you ought to look into it, they must have used an excellent method in our provincial elementary schools, at least back then when I learned to read. Yes I also realized, but not until later, that there are countries where people don’t know how to read, at least not quickly, but speed is important, not only concentration, can you please tell me who can keep chewing on a simple or even a complex sentence without feeling disgust, either with the eyes or the mouth, just keep on grinding away, over and over, a sentence which only consists of subject and predicate must be consumed rapidly, a sentence with many appositions must for that very reason be taken at tremendous speed, with the eyeballs performing an imperceptible slalom, since a sentence doesn’t convey anything to itself, it has to “convey” something to the reader. I couldn’t “work my way through” a book, that would almost be an occupation. There are people, I tell you, you come across the strangest surprises in this field of reading . . . I do profess a certain weakness for illiterates, I even know someone here who doesn’t read and doesn’t want to, a person who has succumbed to the vice of reading more easily understands such a state of innocence, really unless people are truly capable of reading they ought not to read at all.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“I have lived in Ivan and die in Malina.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina