The German Girl Quotes
"I was almost twelve years old when I decided to kill my parents."
"There’s nothing to be done. It’s all over. We have to leave."
"So that you can leave a trail out of the labyrinth like Ariadne," he whispered.
"You smell like the old ladies on Grosse Hamburger Strasse," Leo taunted me.
"She’s more German than anyone," she would insist whenever she mentioned the divine Garbo, who was, in fact, Swedish.
"I’m German, Hannah. I am a Strauss. Alma Strauss. Isn’t that enough, Hannah?"
"If he’d known he had a daughter on the way, he would still be here with us," Mom insisted every September.
"Your father is an enigma. But he’s the enigma I loved most in my entire life."
"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner…"
"What have we done for me to have to endure that? What crime had we committed?"
"I always thought there was nobody more courageous and intelligent than Papa."
"No one can touch French dressmakers," she boasted to her fans.
"I’m losing my sight," he told us one morning.
"It was time for us to make a decision. It didn’t matter if we made a mistake and ended up in the wrong place. We had to do something."
"You have to leave islands," he would always tell Mom. "That’s what you think when the endless sea is your only frontier."
"The day she announced she was getting married, none of her friends asked if Dad was Hispanic, Jewish, or a foreigner just passing through."
"My Hannah, what have we done to you…" he whispered, his voice choking.
"Look out of the window," Papa said. "The tulips are about to bloom."
"We’re not going to the Sahara Desert, Mom. It’s an island where there are breezes, and the sea is on all sides,"
"We’ll never come back here. But we will survive, Hannah. I’m sure of that,"
"We’re leaving on the thirteenth of May," said Leo, striding out ahead. "We’ll leave from Hamburg, bound for Havana."
"It was better to die than to be taken prisoner."
"We’re leaving by the front door and with our heads held high," Mama declared.
"Herr Rosenthal, I hope we never have to meet again," the Ogre declared.
"This is the most important luggage we have. We can lose our clothes, our possessions, even our money, but these papers are our salvation."
"Cuba is the only country that will have us. Don’t ever forget that, Hannah."
"We were a wretched mass of fleeing people who had been kicked out of our homes. In just a few seconds, we had become immigrants."
"We’re going—together—to somewhere where no one would measure our heads or noses, or compare the texture of our hair, or classify the color of our eyes."
"Would we plant tulips? I had no idea if tulips grew in Cuba."
"In einem kühlen Grunde, / Da geht ein Mühlenrad, / Meine Liebste ist verschwunden, / Die dort gewohnet hat."
"The captain was watching us from the bridge, pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back."
"If Leo stays on this ship, so will I. If Papa stays, so will Mama."
"We lived on illusions and woke up far too late."
"I was making him suffer, and he grew desperate."
"Nobody knew what was going to happen to them."
"My mother decided to wear the same indigo-blue suit whenever she met Mrs. Samuels."
"It’s enough having it up here," she says, touching her temple.
"Everything here dries out. And I so much wanted to grow tulips."
"In the blink of an eye, dozens of students began rushing down the steps."
"Yes, Ana, but pronounced like it begins with a J."
"They were shouting slogans I couldn’t make out because they became confused with the police sirens."
"We probably won’t have a power outage today."