Günter Grass

“الذاكرة زائفة, كيف تكذّب ذكرياتنا دائمًا: تغير ترتيب الأحداث, وتعطي معنىً لشيء لم يكن له معنى, وتجمّل وتبجّل? لهذا أكتفي بما فعلته, بالمظاهر المحددة, بشكل موضوعي, لا أرغب بتضليل أو باختراع أشياء من ذكراتي.”

“We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn't God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.”

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

“And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.”

“Klepp, however...must have given the cigarette girl a photo unbeknownst to me, because he became engaged to the snippety little thing and married her one day, because he wanted to have his picture back”

“I am not trying to say that a passport photo of himself can cure a gloomy man of a gloom for which there is no ground; for true gloom is by nature groundless; such gloom, ours at least, can be traced to no identifiable cause, and with its almost riotous gratuitousness this gloom of ours attained a pitch of intensity that would yield to nothing. If there was any way of making friends with our gloom, it was through the photos, because in these serial snapshots we found an image of ourselves which, though not exactly clear, was - and that was the essential - passive and neutralized. They gave us a kind of freedom in our dealings with ourselves; we could drink beer, torture our blood sausages, make merry and play. We bent and folded the pictures, and cut them up with little scissors we carried about with us for this precise purpose. We juxtaposed old and new pictures, made ourselves one-eyed or three-eyed, put noses on our ears, made our exposed right ears into organs of speech or silence, combined chins and foreheads. And it was not only each with his own likeness that we made these montages; Klepp borrowed features from me and I from him: thus we succeeded in making new, and we hoped, happier creatures.”

“We struck up a conversation, taking pains at first to give it an easy flow and sticking to the most frivolous topics. Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would absolutely have to die, but he was less sure that all men had to be born...”

“...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...”

“At the beginning of the semester, Ulla wanted to pose only for the 'new trends' - a flea that Meiter, her Easter egg painter had put in her ear; his engagement present to her had been a vocabulary which she tried out in conversations with me. She spoke of relationships, constellations, actions, perspectives, granular structures, processes of fusion, phenomena of erosion. She, whose daily fare consisted exclusively of bananas and tomato juice, spoke of proto-cells, color atoms which in their dynamic flat trajectories found their natural positions in their fields of forces, but did not stop there; no, they went on and on... This was the tone of the conversation with me during our rest periods or when we went out for an occasional cup of coffee in Ratinger-Strasse. Even when her engagement to the dynamic painter of Easter eggs had ceased to be, even when after a brief episode with a Lesbian she took up with one of Kuchen's students and returned to the objective world, she retained this vocabulary which so strained her little face that two sharp, rather fanatical creases formed on either side of her mouth.”

“...I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters”

“...there is no such thing as a parttime partisan. Real partisans are partisans always and as long as they live. They put fallen governments back in power and overthrow governments that have just been put in power with the help of partisans. Mr Matzerath contended - and his thesis struck me as perfectly plausible - that among all those who go in for politics your incorrigible partisan, who undermines what he has just set up, is closest to the artist because he consistently rejects what he has just set up.”

“Man mag noch so viel über die beliebte Dreiecksthematik des Theaters schimpfen; zwei Personen alleine auf der Bühne, was sollen sie tun, als sich totdiskutieren oder insgeheim nach dem Dritten sehnen.”

“...there is also such a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness.”

“The god of unreflecting drunkenness advised me to take no reading matter at all, or if I absolutely insisted on reading matter, then a little stack of Rasputin would do; Apollo, on the other hand, in his shrewd, sensible way, tried to talk me out of this trip to France altogether, but when he saw that Oskar's mind was made up, insisted on proper baggage; very well, I would have to take the highly respectable yawn that Goethe had yawned so long ago, but for spite, and also because I knew that The Elective Affinities would never solve all my sexual problems, I also took Rasputin and his naked women, naked but for their black stockings. If Apollo strove for harmony and Dionysus for drunkenness and chaos, Oskar was a little demigod whose business it was to harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason. In addition to his mortality, he had one advantage over all the full divinities whose characters and careers had been established in the remote past: Oskar could read what he pleased whereas the gods censored themselves.”

“Hundert teppichklopfende Weiber können einen Himmel erstürmen, können jungen Schwalben die Flügelspitzen stumpf machen und brachten Oskars in die Aprilluft getrommeltes Tempelchen mit weningen Schlägen zum Einsturz.”

“Once upon a time there was a musician who slew his four cats, stuffed them in a garbage can, left the building, and went to visit friends.”

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

“Thus my task was destruction.”

“So rode the squadrons out against the grey steel foe, adding another dash of red to the sunset glow.”

“They had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out.”

“What did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they could cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it?”

“When Satan's not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn't even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?”

“Behind all sorrows in the world Klepp saw a ravenous hunger; all human suffering, he believed, could be cured with a portion of blood sausage. What quantities of fresh blood sausage with rings of onion, washed down with beer, Oskar consumed in order to make his friend think his sorrow's name was hunger and not Sister Dorothy.”

“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.”

“Suppose you're teaching math. You assume that parallel lines meet at infinity. You'll admit that adds up to something like transcendence.”

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

“You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

“But every time I shunned books, as scholars sometimes do, cursed them as verbal graveyards, and tried to make contact with the common folk, I ran up against the kids in our building and felt fortunate, after a few brushes with those little cannibals, to return to my reading in one piece.”

“We struck up a conversation, but took pains to keep to small talk at first. We touched on the most trivial of topics: I asked if he thought the fate of man was unalterable. He thought it was.”

“The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.”

“Einerseits geben Wörter Sinn, andererseits sind sie tauglich, Unsinn zu stiften. Wörter können heilsam oder verletzend sein. Das Wort als Waffe. Sich spreizende, auftrumpfende, mit Bedeutung gemästete Wörter. Manche sind Zungenbrecher, andere lassen erkennen, verschleiern, leugnen ab, decken zu oder auf. Oft liegen winzige Wahrheiten unter Wortlawinen begraben. Aus Wortstreit entspringen Schimpfwörter. Flüche, Beschwörungen, Zaubersprüche bannen, rufen herbei, lassen wahre Wunder geschehen.”

“Doch das sei abermals betont: angestoßen, politisch zu werden, hat mich nicht Willy Brandt, sondern der allerchristlichste Kanzler. Er, der sich aus Nächstenliebe den Kommentator der Rassengesetze, Hans Globke, als Staatssekretär hielt, er, dem das christliche Abendland nur bis zur Elbe reichte, er verdächtigte den Emigranten Brandt „alias Frahm“ unterschwellig des Landesverrats. Sein Christentum katholischer Machart gab ihm ein, uneheliche Herkunft als Makel anzuprangern. Konrad Adenauer war jedes Mittel recht, weshalb er immer noch als Staatsmann gilt.”

“Sie hält nicht, was sie verspricht. Weder ist die ihre eingeschriebene soziale Verpflichtung des Eigentums Wirklichkeit geworden, noch ist jeder Bürger vor dem Gesetz gleich. Als sich nach dem Zerfall des anderen deutschen Staates Aussicht auf Einheit bot, wurde der Schlußartikel des Grundgesetzes, der im Fall möglicher Vereinigung beider Staaten vorschrieb, der gesamtdeutschen Bevölkerung eine neue Verfassung vorzulegen, gebeugt und später getilgt. Und seitdem das Verfassungsrecht auf Asyl beschnitten, nur noch Fragment ist, sind Abschiebehaft und gewaltsames Abschieben von Flüchtlingen tagtägliche Praxis; beschämend nicht nur für jeden, der sich noch immer Verfassungspatriot nennt”

“When the young womanleans over the sky,about to water the flowers as well as the weeds,her white front splits openuntil her milk runs.”

“Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE”

“LoveThat’s it:The cashless commerce.The blanket always too short.The loose connexion.To search behind the horizon.To brush fallen leaves with four shoesand 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 stopsand burns its programme,the word in falsetto soundsdifferent and new each time.Today, in front of a box office not yet open,hand in hand crackledthe hangdog old man and the dainty old woman.The film promised love.”

“An empty bus hurtles through the starry nightPerhaps the driver is singingand happy because he sings.”

“On sorrow floats laughter.”

“He was taking advantage of the brief lull in the battle to take a little nap, for do not all men, even heroes, need a refreshing little nap now and then?”

“Hoy ya sé que todo nos espía, que nada pasa inadvertido y que aun el papal pintado de las paredes tiene mejor memoria que los hombres. Y no es el buen Dios el que lo ve todo. No, una silla de cocina, una percha, ceniceros a medio llenar o la imagen de una mujer llamada Niobe bastan para proporcionar de todo acto un testimonio imperecedero.”

“Mamá sabía ser alegre. Mamá sabía ser temerosa. Mamá sabía olvidar fácilmente. Y, sin embargo tenía buena memoria. Mamá me daba con la puerta en la narices, y sin embargo, me admitía en su baño. A veces mamá se me perdía, pero su instinto me encontraba. Cuando yo rompía vidrios, mamá ponía la masilla. A veces se instalaba en el error, aunque a su alrededor hubiera sillas suficientes. Aun cuando se encerraba en sí misma, para mí siempre estaba abierta. Temía las corrientes de aire y sin embargo no paraba de levantar el viento. Gastaba, y no le gustaba pagar impuestos. Yo era el revés de su medalla. Cuando mamá jugaba corazones ganaba siempre. ”

“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.”

“Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.”

“...sólo los auténticos perezosos son capaces de hacer inventos para ahorrar trabajo.”

“And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I'll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice.... ”

“Because menare killing the foreststhe fairy tales are running away.The spindle doesn't knowwhom to prick,the little girl's handsthat her father has chopped off,haven't a single tree to catch hold of,the third wish remains unspoken.King Thrushbeard no longer owns one thing.Children can no longer get lost.The number seven means no more than exactly seven.Because men have killed the forests,the fairy tales are trotting off to the citiesand end badly.”

“Eles não podem agir de outra maneira, os senhores da criação. O privilégio da criação lhes é irrenunciável. Nós, mulheres, temos que ser criaturas, sim, e criaturas perfeitas. Sejamos agradecidas aos cavaleiros suecos, principalmente ao fatídico Axel, por terem desequilibrado tão artisticamente as faculdades da menina Agnes. As mulheres levemente desequilibradas se qualificam como musas excelentes.”