“If you don't have the right things, you improvise. the wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn out to be the only right things, simply because they're what you have.”

— Herta Müller, book The Hunger Angel

Source: The Hunger Angel (2012), p. 6

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If you don't have the right things, you improvise. the wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn ou…" by Herta Müller?

Herta Müller photo

Herta Müller28

German-Romanian novelist, poet and essayist 1953

Related quotes

“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

“You don't have to think about doing the right thing. If you're for the right thing, then you do it without thinking.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Quoting her mother's statement after her son's birth, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

“You have much more power when you are working for the right thing than when you are working against the wrong thing.”

Peace Pilgrim (1908–1981) American non-denominational spiritual teacher

Source: Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words (1982), Ch. 11 : Transforming Our Society
Context: You have much more power when you are working for the right thing than when you are working against the wrong thing. And, of course, if the right thing is established wrong things will fade away of their own accord. Grass-roots peace work is vitally important. All who work for peace belong to a special peace fellowship — whether we work together or apart.

“There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it—it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it—you don't know what right is and you're not a man.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

We The Living (1936)
Source: We The Living Part One Chapter 6

“Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poets: Old, New, and Aging”, p. 44
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Bruiser

“I like to be the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place. Being the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place is worth it because something interesting always happens.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

“The thing that we need in the world today is a group of men and women who will stand up for right and to be opposed to wrong, wherever it is. A group of people who have come to see that some things are wrong, whether they're never caught up with. And some things are right, whether nobody sees you doing them or not.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)

“All stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life. All those things you fought against as a youth: you begin to realize they're stereotypes because they're true.”

David Cronenberg (1943) Canadian film director, screenwriter and actor

As quoted at "InFuze Magazine" http://infuzemagazine.com/?p=130 (14 Dec 2011)

“There’s a right thing to do,” Holden said.
“You don’t have a right thing, friend,” Miller said. “You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 36 (p. 363)

Related topics