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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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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
Individual
Wherever
Governed
Feelings
Privilege
Wage
Become
Despair
Melancholy
States
Mass
Exception
Mind
Cause
Phenomenon
Earner
Life
Causes
Finds
Quotas
Class
Production
Quota
State
Productions
Ceased

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Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
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On sorrow floats laughter.
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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.
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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.
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...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
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If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
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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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[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
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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?
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There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.
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You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
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Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
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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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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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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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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.
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Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
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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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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.
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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