Quote

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.

Gunter Grass

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gunter Grass
Age: 87 †
Born: 1927
Born: October 16
Died: 2015
Died: April 13
Altar Server
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Lyricist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Playwright
Poet
Printmaker
Danzig
Günter Wilhelm Grass
Günter Graß
Günter Wilhelm Graß
Nothing
Woman
Watching
Chairs
Hangers
Even
Today
Filled
Kitchen
Wallpaper
Every
Better
Beings
Perfectly
Replica
Things
Wells
Clothes
Witness
Wooden
Human
Memories
Sees
Deed
Everything
Goes
Deeds
Chair
Hanger
Humans
Heaven
Serve
Named
Ashtray
Well
Half
Memory
Unseen
Ashtrays

More quotes by Gunter Grass

Image
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
Image
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
Gunter Grass
Image
Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
Gunter Grass
Image
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
Image
An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
Gunter Grass
Image
Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
Gunter Grass
Image
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.
Gunter Grass
Image
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
Image
[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
Gunter Grass
Image
On sorrow floats laughter.
Gunter Grass
Image
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
Image
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.
Gunter Grass
Image
[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
Gunter Grass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
Gunter Grass
Image
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
Image
Students who don't want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.
Gunter Grass
Image
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
Image
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