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We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.

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
Really
Adversity
Afraid
Courage
Face
Faces

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...He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.
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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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The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.
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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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Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
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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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The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.
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Toda idea, al fin y al cabo, es una idea demencial.
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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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The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.
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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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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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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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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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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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The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others.
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Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.
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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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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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