Gunter Grass Quotes

Gunter Grass offers stark, haunting commentary that forces readers to confront the limits of understanding tragedy.

14 quotes

1. Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred.

2. Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.

3. 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.

4. Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

5. If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

6. I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.

7. Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.

8. There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.

9. 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.

10. Art is hard for a puritan to understand.

11. 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.

12. Love That’s it: The cashless commerce. The blanket always too short. The loose connexion. To search behind the horizon. To brush fallen leaves with four shoes and in one’s mind to rub bare feet. To let and rent hearts; or in a room with shower and mirror, in a hired car, bonnet facing the moon, wherever innocence stops and burns its programme, the word in falsetto sounds different and new each time. Today, in front of a box office not yet open, hand in hand crackled the hangdog old man and the dainty old woman. The film promised love.

13. [To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.

14. 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.