Gunter Grass Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?

  Gunter Grass

  Environment, Deny, Has Beens

  20 Copy quote

• Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

  Gunter Grass

  Art, Puritan, Irrational

  New Statesman and Society interview, 1990.

  8 Copy quote

• I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

  Gunter Grass

  Generations, Socialism, Grew Up

  "The steps aren’t enough" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. November 1, 2010.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Gunter Grass

  Auschwitz, Explanation, Ifs

  "The Boys' Crusade". Book by Paul Fussell (p. 15), September 9, 2003.

  36 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Class, Feelings, Mind

  "From the Diary of a Snail". Book by Gunter Grass, www.theguardian.com. 1972.

  10 Copy quote

• Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that.

  Gunter Grass

  Hurt, Lying, Different

  "Gunter Grass speaks to Paris Review about art of fiction". Paris Review Interview, www.newsbangladesh.com. April 14, 2015.

  6 Copy quote

• You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.

  Gunter Grass

  Wicked, Genius, Vain

  5 Copy quote

• I am not faithful but I am attached.

  Gunter Grass

  Marriage, Faithful

  5 Copy quote

• Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. It's not God in his heaven who sees everything. A kitchen chair, a clothes hanger, a half-filled ashtray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can serve perfectly well as an unforgetting witness to our every deed.

  Gunter Grass

  Memories, Clothes, Heaven

  10 Copy quote

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

  Gunter Grass

  Rats, Has Beens

  9 Copy quote

• What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

  Gunter Grass

  Book, Media, Church

  14 Copy quote

• The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.

  Gunter Grass

  Men, Oxen, Forever

  11 Copy quote

• Students who don't want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.

  Gunter Grass

  Achievement, Want, Students

  4 Copy quote

• Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.

  Gunter Grass

  Memories, Unseen, Today

  4 Copy quote

• Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

  Gunter Grass

  Lying, Believe, Grateful

  11 Copy quote

• If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.

  Gunter Grass

  Jesus, Crosses, Ifs

  4 Copy quote

• So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk envolved in choosing the profesión. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.

  Gunter Grass

  Risk, Complaining, Development

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Gunter Grass

  Country, Israel, Want

  12 Copy quote

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

  Gunter Grass

  Men, Breastfeeding, Reason Why

  33 Copy quote

• The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.

  Gunter Grass

  Writing, Thinking, Mind

  11 Copy quote

• I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.

  Gunter Grass

  Years, Volunteer, Criminals

  "A life in writing: Günter Grass" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. November 1, 2010.

  5 Copy quote

• I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

  Gunter Grass

  Progress, Tails, Coins

  "Diary of a Snail (On Stasis and Progress)". Book by Gunter Grass, 1972.

  10 Copy quote

• Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours -- I am not referring to the borders of the graves -- and if you will, a meaning.

  Gunter Grass

  Decision, Borders, Alive

  13 Copy quote

• What I do is sometimes - at least in Germany - met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I've decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn't feel any more.

  Gunter Grass

  Skins, Germany, Campaigns

  "A life in writing: Günter Grass" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. November 1, 2010.

  8 Copy quote

• I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.

  Gunter Grass

  Country, Thinking, Abuse

  7 Copy quote

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