The Dinner Quotes
"Happiness needs nothing but itself, it doesn't have to be validated."
"Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can't stand silence – especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone."
"A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell, the actual evening is hell itself."
"Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
"It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation."
"No pistol must appear if no one's going to fire it."
"It’s the hormones... At moments like this I can’t do anything right anyway."
"I felt something cold and hard inside me – something cold and hard that had been there all evening – grow a little colder and harder."
"There’s not a whole lot you can say about a tournedos except that it’s a piece of meat."
"I’m going to see what’s taking them so long."
"I walked down the gravel pathway with its electric torches."
"I suppose I was the only one who had noticed the wrinkle of irritation on his brow."
"It’s like walking right past an accident because you don’t like the sight of blood."
"He was too old to pass for a schoolboy, but he was the nicest teacher of them all."
"My son and I did have things to hide, we respected each other’s privacy."
"You delinquents, you should be ashamed of yourselves."
"It was awfully well lit. But maybe I was going to need this much light."
"That was all before that evening’s broadcast. Until then it had been little more than a news report, a shocking report, true enough, but still – like all news reports – one that was fated to wear thin: with the passing of time the sharp edges would be dulled, until the story finally disappeared altogether, not important enough in any case to be stored in our collective memory."
"But the security-camera footage changed all that. The boys – the offenders – were given a face, albeit a face that was hard to recognize due to the bad quality of the images and the fact that both wore knitted caps pulled down over their eyebrows."
"Above all, you saw them laughing. That was the moment when the collective memory came into play. It was the key moment: the laughing boys demanded their place in that collective memory."
"Looking back, I can recall the exact moment when I realized that this was not about boys like our nephew or our son, but about our son himself."
"Do you recognize this boy as Michel Lohman? At this point in the proceedings I can still shake my head. That’s hard to say … the images are pretty unclear, I couldn’t swear to it."
"Claire turned her head and looked at me. I held my breath – or rather, I took a deep breath, so that I could be the first to say something. Something – I didn’t know exactly which words I would use – that would change our lives."
"‘Do you want this?’ she asked. ‘Or should I open another one?’"
"Mama. Claire. My wife. Mama had told her son that his father didn’t know about any of this. And that she wanted to keep it that way."
"I’ll make sure we stay away till after midnight, Claire had assured him on his voicemail. So you two have to do it tonight."
"‘But ‘Mama’ was Mama. Mama would always remain Mama.’"
"‘We didn’t know, right?’ he said. ‘How were we supposed to know that there was still something in that jerrycan? It was empty, I swear it was empty.’"
"‘I’d stay where I was if I were you,’ I said calmly. ‘The only thing that’s been damaged so far is a window.’"
"‘So, we fixed that nicely, didn’t we, buddy?’ I said on the way home."
"Michel, why didn’t you tell me? About those videos? Or at least about that one video. Back then? Back when there was still time?"
"‘Michel,’ I said to my son, who had already turned to leave, who had said that it didn’t make any difference, ‘Michel, you have to delete those films. You should have done it a long time ago, but now it’s really important.’"
"‘It’s on the basis of irrational considerations like that that wars are won,’ I said. ‘Or lost.’"
"‘You supposedly said that they had only themselves to blame for being victims,’ the principal said."
"I never put it that way. I only said that not all victims are automatically innocent victims."
"Parents always complain. Tell me something I don’t know already about complaining parents."
"How well did I know this principal, anyway? He had let me have my say without interruption, but what did that mean?"
"Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life."
"And if the ambulance were to drive away without the lights flashing?"
"Sometimes, a silence would drop at the other end after an answer like that."
"I’ve always thought that was strange because for me that moment began much earlier."
"I remained one pillar of a trinity, another pillar was lying only temporarily (temporarily! temporarily! temporarily!) in the hospital."
"No one would be going to intensive care or to the funeral home, quite simply because it had just been decided that way."
"We have to accept that there are real monsters out there."
"Without Claire I wouldn’t have been nowhere, I would have been somewhere else."
"It’s about one homeless person. And more than that one homeless person, I think we should be talking about Rick and Michel."
"It’s really important how you deal with that."
"We don’t want to hand Michel over to some lynch mob that’s only out for blood."
"I never wear a watch. Ever since they put me on non-active I’ve tried to live by the position of the sun, the rotation of the earth, the intensity of the daylight."
"We’re the only ones who know what happened. It’s just not enough to justify sacrificing the future of two fifteen-year-old boys."
"You can’t just walk in there and hold a press conference."
"You want to defend your child, of course, you step up for your child, but you mustn’t do it too vehemently, and above all not too eloquently – you mustn’t drive anyone into a corner."
"Normal people with healthy minds see capital punishment as inhuman."
"I consider myself normal and healthy. And I also consider capital punishment to be inhuman."
"Civilized people don't throw other people out the window."
"With a lie, you give the pin-heads a chance to retreat without losing face."
"If you stayed in one place long enough, you became a face like all the rest."
"I believe that was the moment when I started to get up from my chair, I don’t remember exactly, there’s a blank in there somewhere, a gap in time."
"That which falls is weak, that which lies on the ground is prey."
"The voters saw the scarred face. But they also saw the empty areas. It’s amazing, and in some sense unfair, what a damaged face can do to a person."