Octavian Paler Quotations

The post-totalitarian malady has taken its most acute form in Romania. And it has taken place for very specific reasons. The repression here has been more cruel, more brutal, than in other states caught in the inferno of a 'socialist paradise.'

The statues of Lenin and Stalin are down, but the fight against their ghosts seems harder.

After the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Romanians were crazed with happiness. People who never met each other before hugged each other in the streets - convinced that tomorrow things would look different. Then came the many disappointments.

A life without love is like a year without spring.

Time is a beast who has the immense patience to swallow everything.

We start to die when we no longer have the power to choose.

The others wolves would devour me if they could know that my roar is, in reality, a crying.

There is no wilderness. There is only our inability to fill the emptiness in which we live ...

Next to the highest peak of happiness, there’s the deepest gap of pain.