Quote

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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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
Like
Goes
Bones
Wood
Help
Rivers
Sunset
Helping
Carry
Chairs
Away
Rose
Stomach
Pacts
Doe
Forgotten
Glass
Sunsets
Back
Memory
River
Pact
Everything
Pieces
Glasses
Pencils
Long
Memories
Woods
Floating

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Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
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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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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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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 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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One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.
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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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Students who don't want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.
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Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
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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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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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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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[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
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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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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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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.
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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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[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
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On sorrow floats laughter.
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Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
Gunter Grass