"Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings."
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Quote collection
Gunter Grass quotes (page 4 of 4)
76 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Everyone is born into a certain era. I wouldn't want to see anyone faced with the circumstances that prevailed at the time, when there were few or no alternatives."
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"[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost."
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"Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting."
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"We dance for the pure joy of it. In the kitchen to the record player. Because we've got it in us. All over ... it's not just in the legs. It comes from inside and runs all through you. In waves. From down below to up above. All the way to the scalp."
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"What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he's thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you're past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway."
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"What novel - or what else in the world - can have the epic scope of a photograph album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above, at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures, properly exposed or not, in his album, guide me safely through this album of mine."
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"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."
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"[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images."
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"Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them."
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"When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs."
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"I wept when the muse Ulla bent over me. Blinded by tears I could not prevent her from kissing me, I could not prevent the Muse from giving me that terrible kiss. All of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that Oskar, once branded by that kiss, was condemned to take back the drum he had rejected years before, the drum he had buried in the sand of Sapse Cemetery."
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"Students who don't want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere."
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"My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see."
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"If I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word 'doorknob', because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us."
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"If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross."
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