Book Diary

CR: The Wall, Marlen Haushofer

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Finished quilt top, sandwiching and quilting tomorrow :)

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“She loved life so much, and always did everything wrong, because in our world you can’t love life as much as that with impunity.”

Marlen Haushofer, “The Wall”

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“Lynx, beautiful, good dog, my dog, it’s probably just my poor head making the sound of your footsteps, the gleam of your coat. As long as I exist you’ll follow my trail, hungry and yearning, as I myself, hungry and yearning, follow invisible trails. Neither of us will ever bring our prey to ground.”

Marlen Haushofer, “The Wall”

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For Sophie, 2024

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“The womanliness of my forties had fallen from me, along with my curls, my little double chin and my rounded hips. At the same time I lost the awareness of being a woman. My body, more skillful than myself, had adapted itself and limited the burdens of my femininity to a minimum. I could simply forget I was a woman. Sometimes I was a child in search of strawberries, or a young man sawing wood, or, when sitting on the bench holding Pearl on my scrawny lap watching the setting sun, I was a very old, sexless creature.”

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

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“Even now I’m nothing but a thin skin covering a mountain of memories. I don’t want to go on. What will happen to me if that skin gets torn?”

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

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“I know too that I, like every living thing, will have to die someday day, but my hands, my feet and my guts still don’t know it, which is why death seems so unreal.”

Marlen Haushofer, “The Wall”

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“On the long walk back I thought about my former life and found it unsatisfactory in all respects. I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want. That’s probably how it was for everybody else too. It’s something we never talked about, when we used to talk.”

Marlen Haushofer, “The Wall”