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[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.

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
Find
People
Land
Whatever
Lost
America

More quotes by Gunter Grass

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Art is hard for a puritan to understand.
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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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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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
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How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.
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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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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An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
Gunter Grass
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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.
Gunter Grass
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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.
Gunter Grass
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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.
Gunter Grass
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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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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
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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
Gunter Grass
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Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Gunter Grass
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Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
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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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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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?
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