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

More quotes by Gunter Grass

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An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
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One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.
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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.
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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.
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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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On sorrow floats laughter.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
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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.
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Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
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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 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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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.
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Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
Gunter Grass