|
Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
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.
[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
GUNTER GRASS, The Tin Drum
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.
GUNTER GRASS, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1999
Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn't God in His Heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coat-hanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe, can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.
GUNTER GRASS, The Tin Drum
In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.
Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
GUNTER GRASS, "On Stasis in Progress," From the Diary of a Snail
I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.
GUNTER GRASS, The Tin Drum
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.
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.
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.
You are vain and wicked -- as a genius should be.
GÜNTER GRASS, The Tin Drum
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 any consciousness.
GÜNTER GRASS, The Diary of a Snail
Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours -- I am not referring to the borders of the graves -- and if you will, a meaning.
GUNTER GRASS, The Tin Drum
|
