“In order to pass the time I told him the story of the German who ate the other German whom he’d met on the internet.”

“Avoiding Germans, they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.”

“He told me that once, in the war, he’d come upon a German soldier in the grass with his insides falling out; he was just lying there in agony. The soldier had looked up at Sergeant Leonard, and even though they didn’t speak the same language, they understood each other with just a look. The German lying on the ground; the American standing over him. He put a bullet in the soldier’s head. He didn’t do it with anger, as an enemy, but as a fellow man, one soldier helping another.”

“It's not difficult to sing in German; it's difficult to feel in German. This takes time. It's a culture.”

“Orafoura was yelling at his dog (not a German shepherd) in German, and I thought, “I didn’t realize dogs can speak German.”

“No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.”