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Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

Thomas Bernhard

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Thomas Bernhard
Age: 58 †
Born: 1931
Born: February 9
Died: 1989
Died: February 12
Author
Linguist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard
Speak
Speaks
Others
Exist
Doe
Understood
Enough
Went
Least
Language
Everyone
Misunderstood
Understand
Permit

More quotes by Thomas Bernhard

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I had to spend my entire childhood in the Altensam dungeon like an inmate doing time for no comprehensible reason, for a crime he can't remember committing, a judicial error probably.
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What can you do. You get a name, you're called 'Thomas Bernhard', and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.
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Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
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The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.
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Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.
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The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.
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The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others.
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everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death
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Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.
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We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money.
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Those are terrible people who don't like Glenn Gould... I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.
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Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
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perfidious society masturbators
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The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.
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The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.
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All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.
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...He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.
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Lawyers make nothing but confusion...A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he's a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he's always right.
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Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.
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One day you're cut off, at the very start you're cut off and can't go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again.
Thomas Bernhard