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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

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How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.
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Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
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On sorrow floats laughter.
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[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
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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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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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If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
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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.
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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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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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...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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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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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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One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.
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[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
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Art is hard for a puritan to understand.
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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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What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
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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.
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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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