Heinrich Boll Quotations

We must learn, and especially we Germans, that resistance is not only possible and allowed in dictatorships. There is resistance that man must perform every day.

On a visit to Cologne in March 1945, after a heavy bombing, I met hundreds and hundreds of deserters who were squatting in the rubble, many in the deep cellars left from Roman times. They had been hiding there after the retreat from France.

No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.

My most interesting correspondence is with my translators. I marvel at their sensitivity over certain passages that just anyone, even if he knows German well, would not appreciate.

Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939.

The war is not planned. I don't believe that any responsible person plans it. But it's thought as possible.

Politicians, ideologists, theologians and philosophers try time and again to provide solutions with nothing remaining: prefab solved problems.

Medals don't suit me. I'm not that kind of guy.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.