Elias Canetti

“In ogni essere umano si celano possibilità infinite, che non devono essere scatenate invano. Poiché è terribile quando l'intero uomo risuona di tanti echi, nessuno dei quali diventa una vera voce.”

“Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.”

“Gli occhi molto belli sono insostenibili, bisogna guardarli sempre, ci si affoga dentro, ci si perde, non si sa più dove si è”

“It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.”

“Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?”

“Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open arms into their misfortune?”

“What a man touched upon, he should take with him. If he forgot it, he should be reminded. What gives a man worth is that he incorporates everything he has experienced. This includes the countries where he has lived, the people whose voices he has heard. It also takes in his origins, if he can find out something about them... not only one’s private experience but everything concerning the time and place of one’s beginnings. The words of a language one may have spoken and heard only as a child imply the literature in which it flowered. The story of a banishment must include everything that happened before it as well as the rights subsequently claimed by the victims. Others had fallen before and in different ways; they too are part of the story. It is hard to evaluate the justice of such a claim to history... We should know not only what happened to our fellow men in the past but also what they were capable of. We should know what we ourselves are capable of. For that, much knowledge is needed; from whatever direction, at whatever distance knowledge offers itself, one should reach out for it, keep it fresh, water it and fertilize it with new knowledge.”

“I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no violoncello like him, no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued, in an inexpressibly tender language. I have only these lines on the yellowish paper and words that are never new, for they keep saying the same thing through an entire life.”

“Das Nicht-Wissen darf am Wissen nicht verarmen.”

“A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.”

“Ich sah verwundert, wie bescheiden, ja wie kümmerlich meine Wißbegier war, verglichen mit der eines solchen Mannes (...)”

“The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind”

“ها أنذا أحاول أن أجترح تصوير شيء ما، و ما إن يلفني الصمت حتى أدرك أني ما قلت شيئا على الإطلاق. ثمة مادة دبقة، نورانية، على نحو بديع، بقيت في أعماقي تتحدى الكلمات. و هي اللغة التي لم أتفهمها هناك، و التي من المحتم أنها الآن تجد ترجمتها في دواخلي؟ هناك أحداث، صور، و أصوات بدأ معناها الآن ينبعث حياً، تلك الكلمات التى لم تعرف التسجيل و لا الصياغة التي تكمن فيما وراء الكلمات، أبعد غوراً، أكثر التباساً من الكلمات.”

“...no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people's goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of the victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State.”

“Hay libros que tenemos a nuestro lado veinte años sin leerlos, libros de los que no nos alejamos, que llevamos de una ciudad a otra, de un país a otro, cuidadosamente empaquetados, aunque haya muy poco sitio, y que tal vez hojeamos en el momento de sacarlos de la maleta; sin embargo, nos guardamos muy bien de leer aunque sólo sea una frase completa. Luego, al cabo de veinte años, llega un momento en el que, de repente, como si estuviéramos bajo la presión de un imperativo superior, no podemos hacer otra cosa que coger un libro de estos y leerlo de un tirón, de cabo a rabo: este libro actúa como una revelación. En aquel momento sabemos por qué le hemos hecho tanto caso. Tenía que ocupar sitio; tenía que ser una carga, y ahora ha llegado a la meta de su viaje; ahora levanta su vuelo; ahora ilumina los veinte años transcurridos en los que ha vivido mudo a nuestro lado. No hubiera podido decir tantas cosas si no hubiera estado mudo durante este tiempo, y qué imbécil se atrevería a afirmar que en el libro hubo siempre lo mismo.”

“...how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?”

“I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.”

“There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.”

“ Um Livreiro pode ser um Rei, mas um Rei jamais será um Livreiro.”

“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.”

“Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages”

“Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.”

“Another woman catches sight of Fischerle's hump on the ground and runs screaming into the street: 'Murder! Murder!' She takes the hump for a corpse. Further details - she knows none. The murderer is very thin, a poor sap, how he came to do it, you shouldn't have thought it of him. Shot may be, someone suggests. Of course, everyone heard the shot. Three streets off, the shot had been heard. Not a bit of it, that was a motor tyre. No, it was a shot! The crowd won't be done out of its shot. A threatening attitude is assumed towards the doubters. Don't let him go. An accessory. Trying to confuse the trail! Out of the building comes more news. The woman's statements are revised. The thin man has been murdered. And the corpse on the floor? It's alive. It's the murderer, he had hidden himself. He was tring to creep away between the corpse's legs when he was caught. The more recent information is more detailed. The little man is a dwarf. What do you expect, a cripple! The blow was actually struck by another. A redheaded man. Ah, those redheads. The dwarf put him up to it. Lynch him! The woman gave the alarm. Cheers for the woman! She screamed and screamed. A Woman! Doesn't know what fear is. The murderer had threatened her. The redhead. It's always the Reds. He tore her collar off. No shooting. Of course not. What did he say? Someone must have invented the shot. The dwarf. Where is he? Inside. Rush the doors! No one else can get in. It's full up. What a murder! The woman had a plateful. Thrashed her every day. Half dead, she was. What did she marry a dwarf for? I wouldn't marry a dwarf. And you with a big man to yourself. All she could find. Too few men, that's what it is. The war! Young people to-day...Quite young he was too. Not eighteen. And a dwarf already. Clever! He was born that way. I know that. I've seen him. Went in there. Couldn't stand it. Too much blood. That's why he's so thin. An hour ago he was a great, fat man. Loss of blood, horrible! I tell you corpses swell. That's drowned ones. What do you know about corpses? Took all the jewellery off the corpse he did. Did it for the jewellery. Just outside the jewellery department it was. A pearl necklace. A baroness. He was her footman. No, the baron. Ten thousand pounds. Twenty thousand! A peer of the realm! Handsome too. Why did she send him? Should he have let his wife? It's for her to let him. Ah, men. She's alive though. He's the corpse. Fancy dying like that! A peer of the realm too Serve him right. The unemployed are starving. What's he want with a pearl necklace. String 'em up I say! Mean it too. The whole lot of them. And the Theresianum too. Burn it! Make a nice blaze.”

“Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days”

“The hand which scoops up the water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket. [p. 217]”

“...seizing and incorporating...There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive. [p. 203]”

“...there is something fluid about [packs] during the course of any individual manifestation. [p. 127]”

“All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.”