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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.

Gunter Grass

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Gunter Grass
Age: 87 †
Born: 1927
Born: October 16
Died: 2015
Died: April 13
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Günter Wilhelm Grass
Günter Graß
Günter Wilhelm Graß
Believe
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More quotes by Gunter Grass

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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.
Gunter Grass
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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.
Gunter Grass
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Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
Gunter Grass
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I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
Gunter Grass
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On sorrow floats laughter.
Gunter Grass
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Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.
Gunter Grass
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I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.
Gunter Grass
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Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
Gunter Grass
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An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
Gunter Grass
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Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Gunter Grass
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What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
Gunter Grass
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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
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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.
Gunter Grass
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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.
Gunter Grass
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[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
Gunter Grass
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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.
Gunter Grass
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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?
Gunter Grass
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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
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[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
Gunter Grass
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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