Best 108 quotes in «berlin quotes» category

If we lose sight of pleasures and luxuries that intoxicate the senses in the most sensuous and beautiful and simplest of ways, then we`ve lost a lot.

[I]ch habe es noch in diesem Sommer erneut zu Papier gebracht: Berlin wird leben, und die Mauer wird fallen." ("I put it down on paper again in the summer of this year: Berlin will live, and the Wall will come down.") Speech at Rathaus Schöneberg (Berlin City Hall) on November 10, 1989 [the day after the de facto abolition of intra-German border controls by the East German government]

I woke up early and took the first train to take me away from the city. The noise and all its people. I was alone on the train and had no idea where I was going, and that’s why I went there. Two hours later we arrived in a small town, one of those towns with one single coffee shop and where everyone knows each other’s name. I walked for a while until I found the water, the most peaceful place I know. There I sat and stayed the whole day, with nothing and everything on my mind, cleaning my head. Silence, I learned, is some times the most beautiful sound.

It’s the beating of my heart. The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It’s the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I’d found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door. Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there, I was still the one locking the door every night. Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home. ’cause I was never really well around the expectations of my personality and I wanted to keep to myself. and because I haven’t been very impressed lately. By people, or places. Or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.

In hindsight, it's seen as inevitable that the two Germany's would reunite. But none of the people who had laid the groundwork for the fall-those who had started the tremors and endured the security forces' brutality-envisioned a unified Germany. Those people had sacrificed their places in society for the chance to form a new one, something different and distinct, an independent East Germany built form scratch. The hadn't looked to the West for inspiration before, and none of them looked to the West for salvation now that the border was open.

Invadiu-me um medo estranho. Não queria voltar à solidão do meu quarto. Caminhei pelas ruas de Berlim até à avenida de Kurfürstendamm que, de tão iluminada, era um mundo por si. Nada tinha a ver com o outro, o mundo de todos os dias, cheio de preocupações mesquinhas, em que se comia pingue em vez de manteiga e tomate em vez de carnes frias. Gente bem posta, objectos de luxo, música vindo do interior dos cafés e dos bares.

Nett ist es, wenn bei einer klassischen München-Berlin-Konversation dann einer aus Köln dazustößt. Der hat dann gar nichts zu lachen.

My darlings! You can hardly expect an aged crone like me to mar such a lovely event. No, I shall remain here and knit shadows. Now go forth and shine bravely, and think of nothing but love.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

My home will never be a place, but a state of mind, which I find through my music.

People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don’t believe in making a living. That it’s a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in making a life and money is a distracting object if there’s anything left at the end of the day and I just want to go on well. Make it through the day. So I smile and raise my glass and they laugh and take my hand, saying ”here’s to the youth”, pointing at me. And I might just be young and naive for I still believe in the freedom of choice of how to spend your life. So they toast to the youth, who still think she’s free, and that’s all fine by me.

She just wanted to be herself, and doing, saying, reading and writing the things that would have made her feel like herself were all verboten.

Nothing much bothered you for a while and you kept walking like a silhouette through this town, saying hi’s and goodbyes, acting polite at all times. But there is no fire in your heart; you are not very concerned.

Of babies born alive and in hospitals during that month of July 1945, 92 percent would die within then days.

The ethos of East Berlin punk infused the city with a radical egalitarianism and a DIY approach to maintaining independence-to conjuring up the world you want to live in regardless of the situation or surroundings.

There's horror, lust and ecstasy on stage at the White Mouse The Behrenstrasse's Babel, and Berlin's (second) wildest house! There's love and pain a-plenty dressed in shiny leather boots But whips and chains and naked hips are nothing when you see With your own eyes, This fantasy... Oh oh, those Berliner Girls They'll take you to another world.

There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the Wall. Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I experience something deeply; I'm not sure, even at this ripe middle-age, but I have to admit that what I recall of Berlin is not arranged in my memory in any normal, chronological sequence. My only excuse is that Berlin itself was so abnormal - and yet so bizarrely representative - it was like something unreal; an occasionally macabre Disneyworld which was so much a part of the real world (and the realpolitik world), so much a crystallization of everything these people had managed to produce, wreck, reinstate, venerate, condemn and worship in their history that it defiantly transcended everything it exemplified, and took on a single - if multifariously faceted - meaning of its own; a sum, an answer, a statement no city in its right mind would want or be able to arrive at.

As a five-year-old in Berlin in 1965, I didn't know that funny women existed. It wasn't until I got back to England that I realised women could be funny.

They way I walk now you’d have a hard time recognising me, on these streets where I once imagined walking with you. Hand in hand, like we always did, and it never mattered where we were going because it was all just fine. I was always fine. But they rest restlessly in my pockets now, in a new town, on these new streets, and it’s heavy to stay standing for my body is half the size when you’re gone and these buildings are tall and old and beautiful and I wonder what secrets they hold. How to stand so proud after so many years because I’m still young but I feel worn and I get through the days on too much caffeine and mood altering chemicals to stay awake long enough to make the poetry come alive. I fall asleep on the floor with the music still playing when my neighbour leaves for the office and I’m jealous. I wonder what it’s like to go outside and know where to go, know where you want to end up and just simply go there. I’ve been making lists of things I want to do, where to go and who to be, now that you’re gone, and it’s nice and all, it’s just … I’d rather write it with you, and go there with you. Be things with you. There were days when I still put on make up in case you’d come back, but I wear the same clothes and shower in the rain, eat when I can and sleep when I can, which is rare and not often, so if you’d see me now on these streets where I once imagined walking with you you’d have a hard time recognising me. It takes a lot to run away.

Und Berlin? Und die Mauer? Die Stadt wird leben, und die Mauer wird fallen. Aber eine isolierte Berlin-Lösung, eine, die nicht mit weiterreichenden Veränderungen in Europa und zwischen den Teilen Deutschlands einhergeht, ist immer illusionär gewesen und im Laufe der Jahre nicht wahrscheinlich geworden." ("And Berlin? And the Wall? The city will remain alive, and the Wall is going to come down. But an isolated solution for Berlin, one that does not go hand in hand with the broader changes in Europe and between the two parts of Germany, has always been illusionary and has not become any more probable over the course of the years.")

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend’s sisters, I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.

There were days when I still put on make up in case you’d come back, but I wear the same clothes and shower in the rain and eat when I can and sleep when I can, which is rare and not often, so if you’d see me now on these streets where I once imagined walking with you you’d have a hard time recognising me. I takes a lot to run away.

These handkerchief gardens are a traditional German solution to apartment dwellers' yearning for a tool shed and a vegetable garden. They make a patchwork of green in odd corners of urban land, along train lines or canals or, as here, in the lee of the Wall.

When General George Patton tried to convince Eisenhower to make a push to conquer the city first, Eisenhower blithely asked, 'Well, who would want it?

And of course I like Berlin a lot. It's such an interesting city

As we say in Berlin, there are many ways to bake a parrot.

Berlin is my favourite city.

Berlin is the place to which I am most closely bound by human and scientific ties.

Berlin is like being abroad in Germany. It's German, but not provincial.

Berlin is one of my favorite cities in the world. I feel like the energy is very youthful. It has such an important history, including its recent history of unification.

Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's foray into some artful excursions into some ethereal electric experiments. There was a lot curious activities emerging in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin back then developing some fiercely fuzzy of synth-like effects way outside the norm which really blew the lid off things.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich.

Film is my passion. I had no money, after Human Zoo. I was completely broke. It was horrible. My film was in Berlin on opening night, but I couldn't even get to Berlin.

God bless America, land that I love.

I did a concert... in September with the Berlin Philharmonic... They're great musicians, and there's always something to learn from them.

Hey," said Jace. who was sitting on an overturned speaker, looking at his cellphone, "do you want to see a photo of Alec and Magnus in Berlin?" "Not really," said Simon. "Magnus is wearing lederhosen." "And yet, still no.

I graduated in 1989, and I'd focused almost entirely on the Soviet Union and communism ... so when the Berlin wall fell, I was, well, I was screwed.

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

I like museums in Berlin a lot, especially in the eastern part. They're extraordinarily good.

I had just come off of doing a play in Los Angeles which actually got me the role. It was called Bent and it was at the Mark Taper Forum. I was playing a homosexual in 1930 to 1934 Berlin who is eventually put into a concentration camp for the second half of the play. I had lost about 38 pounds for that.

I know very well that Berlin attaches great importance to NATO and solidarity, in terms of sharing the burden. For this reason, I feel confident that the German government will take the right decision, one that serves both German and NATO interests.

I liked Germany; I'm not into Berlin, it's too huge and empty and imposing, but Munich was good.

In Berlin, things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.

I love deep cleavage on the foot. It reminds me of Berlin in 1930s, 'Cabaret.'

I'm quite sure it happened in Berlin too when Eva [Braun] stayed there later on. I wouldn't know about that because I was scarcely ever there myself. I don't want to suggest she was crying all the time, but then they had their arguments, she was very downcast until she had cried it through. It happened on occasion.

In Berlin Jews controlled almost one hundred percent of the theaters and cinemas before the rise to power.

I'll be like Irving Berlin: "There's no business like show business.

I myself have already spent a third of my life in Germany, first in Cologne and then, since 1994, in Berlin.