Top 100 Gunter Quotes
#1. I hope Gunter Grass will continue helping the SPD in campaigns and that he will otherwise remain with us as a provocative literary figure, as well.
Sigmar Gabriel
#2. 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.
Gunter Grass
#3. How is it that a kiss can say so much?
Saying I love you is huge, but to kiss someone who has told you that means everything. A kiss speaks the truth, and I know. I know in his kisses, that he means every single word.
Heather Gunter
#4. It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.
Gunter Grass
#5. A great deal has been learned about cell communication. The universal nature of cellular structure and organization in bacteria, plant and animal cells has been discovered.
Gunter Blobel
#6. 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.
Gunter Grass
#7. For me,the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.
Gunter Brus
#8. With drawing, I am acutely aware of creating something on a sheet of paper. It is a sensual act, which you cannot say about the act of writing. In fact, I often turn to drawing to recover from the writing.
Gunter Grass
#9. I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
Gunter Grass
#10. 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
#11. 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?
Gunter Grass
#12. 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
Gunter Grass
#13. For me, writing, drawing, and political activism are three separate pursuits; each has its own intensity. I happen to be especially attuned to and engaged with the society in which I live. Both my writing and my drawing are invariably mixed up with politics, whether I want them to be or not.
Gunter Grass
#14. I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.
Gunter Grass
#15. I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains.
Gunter Grass
#16. In 1936, when I was born in the small Silesian village of Waltersdorf in the county of Sprottau in the then-eastern part of Germany, now part of Poland, the fine structure of the cell was still an enigma.
Gunter Blobel
#17. When Jan was called up to service a fourth time...my mother waited outside...the two of them were convinced that this time Jan would have to go, that they would surely send him off to cure his ailing chest in the air of France, famed for its iron and lead content.
Gunter Grass
#18. As soon as I heard there were people in Germany who wanted to restore the old part of Dresden, I wanted to help. Even before the Nobel, I had started this group, the Friends of Dresden. The destruction of Dresden made a big impression on me when I was a child, and I wanted to do this.
Gunter Blobel
#19. 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.
Gunter Grass
#20. There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.
Gunter Grass
#21. 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
#22. I think it's a shame that we have 'Bild' like you have the 'Sun'. Now serious newspapers like 'FAZ' and 'Spiegel' use a bit of the tone of 'Bild.' This is terrible.
Gunter Grass
#23. My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls.
Gunter Brus
#25. Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.
Gunter Grass
#27. To feel myself. Light as a feather free as a bird, though long since fit to be shot down. Unleash the dog with no sense of shame. Become this or that. Awaken the dead. Wear my pal Baldander's rags for a change. Lose my way on a single-minded quest.
Gunter Grass
#28. Be uncomfortable; be sand, not oil, to the machinery of the world.
Gunter Eich
#29. Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
Gunter Grass
#30. 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
#31. I search on my drum for the land of the Poles and drum: lost, not yet lost, lost once more, lost to whom, lost too soon, lost by now, Poland's lost, all is lost, Poland is not yet lost.
Gunter Grass
#32. The structure of many cellular macromolecules has been revealed at the atomic level using x-ray crystallography.
Gunter Blobel
#33. Self-worth: the sense of one's own value or worth as a person; self-esteem; self-respect.
Heather Gunter
#34. Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery.
SHOW YOUR TONGUE
Gunter Grass
#35. Why would that woman shoot me? We had dinner reservations later!
Gunter Vogler
#36. 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.
Gunter Grass
#37. Stuffed cats are able to creep more convincingly than live ones.
Gunter Grass
#38. Suppose you're teaching math. You assume that parallel lines meet at infinity. You'll admit that adds up to something like transcendence.
Gunter Grass
#39. Three times Jan had been called to the colours (the army), but each time had been deferred because of his deplorable physical condition..when every male who could stand halfway erect was being shipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change in posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal
Gunter Grass
#40. Art is created in a state of delirium. Anyting else is the restoration of monuments. Collectors are artist that do not have a home. they have to make one for themselves.
Gunter Brus
#41. A writer must face up to the test of reality, including political reality, and that can't be done if he keeps his distance. A literary style cultivated like a hothouse plant may show a certain artificial purity, but it won't really be pure.
Gunter Grass
#42. People who contend with stressful situations regularly detect more opportunities of this nature than people who are living in pampered circumstances.
Gunter Pauli
#43. 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
#44. Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
Gunter Grass
#45. Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.
Gunter Brus
#46. My sister and I did not have our own rooms, or even a place to ourselves. In the living room, beyond the two windows, was a little corner where my books were kept, and other thing - my watercolors and so on. Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise.
Gunter Grass
#47. They swore by concrete. They built for eternity.
Gunter Grass
#48. [America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
Gunter Grass
#49. I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.
Gunter Grass
#50. We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.'
Gunter Grass
#51. In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.
Gunter Grass
#52. Being covered in white paint ,you demonstrate behaviour intended to create a public nuisance,which did in fact cause offence to members of the public ,and created a breach of the peace and public order.
Gunter Brus
#53. Empower the people around you, from the janitor to the athletic director. You do that by being sincere, caring about others, and then putting it into practice.
Sue Gunter
#54. You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
Gunter Grass
#55. Color will play no part in the art of future.
Gunter Brus
#56. Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
Gunter Grass
#57. Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss.
Gunter Grass
#58. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists.
Gunter Grass
#59. 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
#60. I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive.
Gunter Brus
#61. Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
Gunter Grass
#62. If hell's in store for us someday, one of its most refined forms of torture will be to lock a person naked in a room filled with framed photos of his era.
Gunter Grass
#63. 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.
Gunter Grass
#64. 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.
Gunter Grass
#65. An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman.
Gunter Grass
#66. Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Gunter Grass
#67. Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
Gunter Grass
#68. How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime?
Gunter Grass
#69. Private travel into foreign countries can be requested without conditions [ ... ]. Permission will be granted instantly. Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints between the GDR into the FRG or Berlin (West).
Gunter Schabowski
#70. Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Gunter Grass
#71. What does a river like the Vistula carry away with it? Everything that goes to pieces: wood, glass, pencils, pacts ... chairs, bones, and sunsets too. What had long been forgotten rose to memory, floating on its back or stomach, with the help of the Vistula.
Gunter Grass
#72. Life is about flows not about stuff we have. Water in a tank turns bad. Water that flows gives life. Money in banks turn toxic, it must flow
Gunter Pauli
#73. If you take missions out of the Bible, you won't have anything left but the covers.
Nina Gunter
#75. Writing without making mistakes is like vomiting hot air.
Gunter Brus
#76. The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
Gunter Grass
#77. For marriage has nothing in common with love. marriage makes for security; love makes only for suffering. On the other hand, love could be so distilled, spun so fine as to implicate third and fourth persons, as to take up three or four exciting acts in a play.
Gunter Grass
#78. The tremendous acquisition of basic knowledge will allow a much more rational treatment of cancer, viral infections, degenerative diseases and, most importantly, mental diseases.
Gunter Blobel
#79. My pride in Joachim Mahlke was as sweet as chocolate creams.
Gunter Grass
#80. You become an artist to upset your family.
Gunter Brus
#81. 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.
Gunter Grass
#82. We are selling ourselves very short by funneling our energies into what the traditional perception is of academic and monetary success.
Gunter Pauli
#83. 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
#84. Our lives are full of stress. Some meditate, some walk, some sing and dance. Nature offers us garlic, maitake and hibiscus to relieve stress
Gunter Pauli
#85. People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?
Gunter Grass
#86. If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
Gunter Grass
#87. Art is beautiful but it is hard, like a religion without a purpose.
Gunter Brus
#88. And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.
Gunter Grass
#89. 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
#90. As long as we do not know how the cell works, we don't know the kind of havoc the AIDS virus creates in the cell.
Gunter Blobel
#91. As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.
Gunter Grass
#92. We are reducing the number of relationships. We are slowly but surely consuming the massive reserves of energy that have been accumulating and are stored in the ecosystems.
Gunter Pauli
#94. And Oskar was kneeling at the left side-altar, trying to teach the boy Jesus how to drum, but the rascal wouldn't drum, offered no miracle. Oskar had sworn back then and swore again outside the locked church door: I'll teach him to drum yet. Sooner or later.
Gunter Grass
#95. [To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
Gunter Grass
#96. No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn't pure. And the sun has spots.
Gunter Grass
#97. Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
Gunter Grass
#98. In basic research, the use of the electron microscope has revealed to us the complex universe of the cell, the basic unit of life.
Gunter Blobel
#100. The European Union arose on an economic foundation, and it turns out that even this is not a solid base. Cultural identity has been neglected.
Gunter Grass
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