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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.

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
Later
Mystery
Attaching
Inside
Meanings
Goes
Mysteries
Crazy
Sooner
Keep
Bound
Thought
Perceive
Everything
Bounds

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I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
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Toda idea, al fin y al cabo, es una idea demencial.
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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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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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We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.
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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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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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The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
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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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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.
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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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Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.
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