Wings of Desire (1987)

Otto Sander: Cassiel

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Quotes 

• Damiel : It's great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth. I'd like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say "Now." Now and now" and no longer "forever" and "for eternity." To sit at an empty place at a card table and be greeted, even by a nod. Every time we participated, it was a pretense. Wrestling with one, allowing a hip to be put out in pretense, catching a fish in pretense, in pretense sitting at tables, drinking and eating in pretense. Having lambs roasted and wine served in the tents out there in the desert, only in pretense. No, I don't have to beget a child or plant a tree but it would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat, like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever and blackended fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck by an ear. To lie! Through one's teeth. As you're walking, to feel your bones moving along. At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say "ah" and "oh" and "hey" instead of "yea" and "amen."

  Cassiel : Yeah, to be able, once in a while, to enthuse for evil. To draw all the demons of the earth from passers-by and to chase them out into the world. To be a savage.

  Damiel : Or at last to feel how it is to take off shoes under a table and wriggle your toes barefoot, like that.

  Cassiel : Stay alone! Let things happen! Keep serious! We can only be savages in as much as we keep serious. Do no more than look! Assemble, testify, preserve! Remain spirit! Keep your distance. Keep your word.

• Cassiel : An old man read to a child from "The Odyssey" and the young listener stopped blinking completely. And what do you have to report?

  Damiel : A woman in the rain who folded up her umbrella and let herself get drenched. A schoolboy describing to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth and astonished the teacher. A blind woman who sensed my presence and groped at her watch.

• Cassiel : Twenty years ago today a Soviet jet fighter crashed into the lake at Spandau. Fifty years ago -...

  Damiel : The Olympic Games!

  Cassiel : A Frenchman flew over the city in a hot air balloon 20 years ago.

  Damiel : Like those refugees recently.

  Cassiel : And today on the Lilienthaler Chaussee, a man slowed down and looked over his shoulder into space. And a man who wanted to end it all today put a different collector's stamp on each farewell letter.