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I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.

Witold Gombrowicz

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Witold Gombrowicz
Age: 64 †
Born: 1904
Born: August 4
Died: 1969
Died: July 24
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Gombrowicz
Witold Gombrowicz
Second
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Powerful
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Tormenting
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Never
Genius

More quotes by Witold Gombrowicz

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When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras. You've no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it's incredible how one grows.
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I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.
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I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.
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Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.
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Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.
Witold Gombrowicz
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To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
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You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!
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To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
Witold Gombrowicz
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Don't be fooled by your own wisdom
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Our element is unending immaturity.
Witold Gombrowicz
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Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
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Great! I've written something stupid, but I haven't signed a contract with anyone to produce solely wise and perfect works. I gave vent to my stupidity...and here I am, reborn.
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I am a collection of the family's body parts.
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Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.
Witold Gombrowicz
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Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.
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Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.
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You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.
Witold Gombrowicz
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A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed.
Witold Gombrowicz
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Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
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Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.
Witold Gombrowicz