Gunter Grass Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

  Gunter Grass

  Age, Dawn, Principles

  "From the Diary of a Snail". Book by Gunter Grass, www.theguardian.com. 1972.

  9 Copy quote

• I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.

  Gunter Grass

  Country, Thinking, Abuse

  8 Copy quote

• People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?

  Gunter Grass

  Children, Thinking, Years

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Eye, Sight, Blue

  The Tin Drum bk. 1, ch. 1 (1959)

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Growth, Needs, Chance

  7 Copy quote

• In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.

  Gunter Grass

  Death, Numbers, Statistics

  7 Copy quote

• ...I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters

  Gunter Grass

  Hands, Left Hand, Fists

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Uncles, Children, Law

  16 Copy quote

• Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

  Gunter Grass

  Writing, Sometimes, Drawers

  "Look back in anger" by James Meek, www.theguardian.com. June 23, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• What does a river like the Vistula carry away with it? Everything that goes to pieces: wood, glass, pencils, pacts ... chairs, bones, and sunsets too. What had long been forgotten rose to memory, floating on its back or stomach, with the help of the Vistula.

  Gunter Grass

  Memories, Sunset, Glasses

  5 Copy quote

• [To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.

  Gunter Grass

  Artist, Desire, Conquer

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Memories, Trying, Together

  4 Copy quote

• 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?

  Gunter Grass

  Triumph, Satan, Virtue

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Moving, Men, Trying

  5 Copy quote

• I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.

  Gunter Grass

  Morning, Reading, Believe

  "Gunter Grass speaks to Paris Review about art of fiction". Paris Review Interview, www.newsbangladesh.com. April 14, 2015.

  5 Copy quote

• Everyone is born into a certain era. I wouldn't want to see anyone faced with the circumstances that prevailed at the time, when there were few or no alternatives.

  Gunter Grass

  Alternatives, Want, Eras

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Kissing, Years, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs.

  Gunter Grass

  Running, Weed, Flower

  4 Copy quote

• What novel - or what else in the world - can have the epic scope of a photograph album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above, at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures, properly exposed or not, in his album, guide me safely through this album of mine.

  Gunter Grass

  Father, Sunday, Epic

  4 Copy quote

• Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.

  Gunter Grass

  Writing, Drawing, Age

  "Gunter Grass speaks to Paris Review about art of fiction". Paris Review Interview, www.newsbangladesh.com. April 14, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• We dance for the pure joy of it. In the kitchen to the record player. Because we've got it in us. All over ... it's not just in the legs. It comes from inside and runs all through you. In waves. From down below to up above. All the way to the scalp.

  Gunter Grass

  Running, Player, Joy

  4 Copy quote

• What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he's thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you're past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway.

  Gunter Grass

  Baby, Past, Hair

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Communication, Loss, Expression

  5 Copy quote

• My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.

  Gunter Grass

  Mother, Childhood, Thumbs

  4 Copy quote

• I catch myself judging myself as that 13-year-old boy, who, of course, rightfully points out that he is only a child. And my membership - well, I was drafted into the Waffen-SS and didn't exactly volunteer, which was just as idiotic. I wanted to be on the submarines and then ended up with the Waffen-SS.

  Gunter Grass

  Children, Boys, Years

  7 Copy quote

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