"Momo listened to everyone and everything - even to the rain and the wind and the pine trees - and all of them spoke to her after their own fashion"
About this Quote
Listening, in Ende's hands, is not a soft virtue; it's a quiet superpower that makes the modern world look a little ridiculous. "Momo listened to everyone and everything" reads like a children's-book premise, then tilts into something stranger: attention so complete it dissolves the hierarchy between people and weather, between social chatter and the pine trees' slow, indifferent speech. The line insists that meaning isn't scarce. Our receptivity is.
The intent is pointed. Ende wrote Momo as a fable against the industrialization of time, a culture that treats minutes like currency and conversation like waste. In that context, Momo's listening becomes an act of resistance. It's not therapy-speak empathy; it's anti-extraction. She doesn't mine others for information, status, or advantage. She creates a space where the overlooked can finally sound like itself. That's why "after their own fashion" matters: she doesn't force translation into her terms. She doesn't correct, curate, or optimize.
The subtext is also ecological without becoming preachy. By granting the rain and wind a voice, Ende nudges the reader toward an older literacy, one that recognizes that the nonhuman world is communicating all the time, just not in the language of deadlines. Momo hears it because she has time in the way children do before time gets colonized.
It's a deceptively gentle sentence with a sharp accusation inside: if everything is speaking, what does it say about us that we so rarely hear anything at all?
The intent is pointed. Ende wrote Momo as a fable against the industrialization of time, a culture that treats minutes like currency and conversation like waste. In that context, Momo's listening becomes an act of resistance. It's not therapy-speak empathy; it's anti-extraction. She doesn't mine others for information, status, or advantage. She creates a space where the overlooked can finally sound like itself. That's why "after their own fashion" matters: she doesn't force translation into her terms. She doesn't correct, curate, or optimize.
The subtext is also ecological without becoming preachy. By granting the rain and wind a voice, Ende nudges the reader toward an older literacy, one that recognizes that the nonhuman world is communicating all the time, just not in the language of deadlines. Momo hears it because she has time in the way children do before time gets colonized.
It's a deceptively gentle sentence with a sharp accusation inside: if everything is speaking, what does it say about us that we so rarely hear anything at all?
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
|---|---|
| Source | Momo — Michael Ende, novel (original German ed. 1973). The quoted passage is from the book Momo and appears in English translations of the novel. |
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