Peter

“He [Mihaly Babits] hoped that some god might offer a bed to the river of words which rose to his lips, so that it might flow between ordered banks to the sea, there to vanish.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Sorrow beyond dreams.”
― Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

“For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects.”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.”
― John Le Carre