Grass, Gunther quotes
1927 German AuthorArt is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
Grass, Gunther
Compromise
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.
Grass, Gunther
Despair
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
Grass, Gunther
Future
Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.
Grass, Gunther
Information
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.
Grass, Gunther
Modern and Modernism
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.
Grass, Gunther
Mind
Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
Grass, Gunther
Belief
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that s hard for a puritan to understand.
Grass, Gunther
Arts and Artists
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.
Grass, Gunther
Utopia