Gunter Grass Quotes
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The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.
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Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.
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Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.
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Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one had only to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.
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Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
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[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
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Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that.
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Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
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And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I'll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice.
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After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game.
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The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
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I wept when the muse Ulla bent over me. Blinded by tears I could not prevent her from kissing me, I could not prevent the Muse from giving me that terrible kiss. All of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that Oskar, once branded by that kiss, was condemned to take back the drum he had rejected years before, the drum he had buried in the sand of Sapse Cemetery.
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Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human contact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP.
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Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
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On sorrow floats laughter.
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I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.
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Love That’s it: The cashless commerce. The blanket always too short. The loose connexion. To search behind the horizon. To brush fallen leaves with four shoes and in one’s mind to rub bare feet. To let and rent hearts; or in a room with shower and mirror, in a hired car, bonnet facing the moon, wherever innocence stops and burns its programme, the word in falsetto sounds different and new each time. Today, in front of a box office not yet open, hand in hand crackled the hangdog old man and the dainty old woman. The film promised love.
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When Satan's not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn't even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?
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Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
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We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
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People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies.
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Can it be that action is active resignation? Something is trying to develop; it moves ever so slightly, and there comes your man of action and bashes in the hothouse windows.
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It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.
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Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. It's not God in his heaven who sees everything. A kitchen chair, a clothes hanger, a half-filled ashtray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can serve perfectly well as an unforgetting witness to our every deed.
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I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.
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Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
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In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.
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If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
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Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
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I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
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