Gunter Quotes & Sayings

It was one of the great pleasures of my life to donate the entire sum of the Nobel Prize, in memory of my sister Ruth Blobel, to the restoration of Dresden. — Gunter Blobel

I was 8 years old in the spring of 1945 when my family fled Silesia to escape the Russian army. On our way, we passed through Dresden. A few days later, it was firebombed. The fire was so bright that night that one could read a newspaper from the light, though we were many kilometers away. — Gunter Blobel

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

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself. — Gunter Grass

Color will play no part in the art of future. — Gunter Brus

How easily the routine of sin establishes itself. — Gunter Grass

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? — Gunter Grass

One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid. — Gunter Grass

That's why I write; to bear the world as it crumbles. — Gunter Kunert

I've always been surrounded by children - never bothered by their noise. — Gunter Grass

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

Why would that woman shoot me? We had dinner reservations later! — Gunter Vogler

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

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

We are selling ourselves very short by funneling our energies into what the traditional perception is of academic and monetary success. — Gunter Pauli

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

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

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

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

People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies. — Gunter Grass

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

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

In the United States, the wealthy have a tradition of charity. But in Germany, the rich say, 'We pay taxes. It's enough.' — Gunter Blobel

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

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

How did it happen that an enlightened country like Germany was pulled into Nazism? That question has occupied me since 'The Tin Drum,' my first book. The story also shows that we can never know how a person's life will unfold; there is no guarantee that a person will do what is right and avoid what is not right. — Gunter Grass

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

The structure of many cellular macromolecules has been revealed at the atomic level using x-ray crystallography. — Gunter Blobel

I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years. — Gunter Grass

Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped. — Gunter Grass

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. — Gunter Grass

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

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 — Gunter Grass

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. — Gunter Grass

Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed? — Gunter Grass

I've also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. — Gunter Grass

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

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

What more can I say: born beneath light bulbs, interrupted my growth at the age of three, was given a drum, sangshattered glass, smelled vanilla, coughed in churches, stuffed Luzie with food, watched ants as they crawled, decided to grow, buried the drum, moved to the West, lost what was East, learned to carve stone and posed as a model, went back to my drum and inspected concrete, made money and cared for the finger, gave the finger away and fled as I laughed, ascended, arrested, convicted, confined, now soon to be freed, and today is my birthday, I'm thirty years old, and still as afraid of the Black Cook as ever - Amen. — Gunter Grass

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

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

Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human contact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP. — Gunter Grass

I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense. — Gunter Grass

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

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

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

Auschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany. — Gunter Grass

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

I remember when I was writing 'The Tin Drum,' I had the totally misguided idea of giving Oskar Matzerath a sister, and he just wouldn't have it. There was no space for a sister, yet I had the character of the sister in my head. In fact I used her in later novels, in 'Cat and Mouse' and 'Dog Years,' Tulla Pokriski. — Gunter Grass

An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman. — Gunter Grass

Key in life is to be able to answer the question "How much is enough?" Modern society has a desire to accumulate stuff & do nothing with it — Gunter Pauli

Our minds aren't bound by a chronological corset. When thinking and dreaming, past, present and future are mixed up. That's also possible for a writer. — Gunter Grass

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. — Gunter Grass

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them. — Gunter Grass

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

You American intellectuals - you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted! — Gunter Grass

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

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

I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music. — Gunter Grass

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well. — Gunter Grass

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

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

Writing without making mistakes is like vomiting hot air. — Gunter Brus

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

So rode the squadrons out against the grey steel foe, adding another dash of red to the sunset glow. — Gunter Grass

Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. — Gunter Grass

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. — Gunter Grass

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. — Gunter Grass

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

Art is beautiful but it is hard, like a religion without a purpose. — Gunter Brus

In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death. — Gunter Grass

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

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

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin. — Gunter Grass

What can you say about a guy who lets himself be saddled with a baby when he's thirty-five and losing his hair? Love? Forget about that till you're past seventy, and by then the parts will have stopped working anyway. — Gunter Grass

People who contend with stressful situations regularly detect more opportunities of this nature than people who are living in pampered circumstances. — Gunter Pauli

Although I completed two years of internship in various small hospitals, I decided against continuing my medical training. I was much more fascinated by the unsolved problems of medicine than by practicing it. — Gunter Blobel

Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work. — Gunter Grass

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

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. — Gunter Grass

Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd. — Gunter Grass

They swore by concrete. They built for eternity. — Gunter Grass

Stuffed cats are able to creep more convincingly than live ones. — Gunter Grass

Even the most fanciful story contains nuggets of truth. As readers, our job is to mine them. — Michael Gunter

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

The pencil-stroke is like cutting into the heart. — Gunter Brus

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

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

Because men
are killing the forests
the fairy tales are running away.
The spindle doesn't know
whom to prick,
the little girl's hands
that 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 cities
and end badly. — Gunter Grass

The grim portrait of Beethoven hanging over the piano ... was removed from its nail, and an equally grim portrait of Hitler was hung on the same nail ... Mama ... insisted that Beethoven be placed, if not over the sofa, at least over the sideboard. This resulted in the grimmest of confrontations: Hitler and the genius hung opposite each other, stared at each other, saw through each other, yet found no joy in what they saw. — Gunter Grass

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

Tori, are you smoking crack or something?"

The bell rings and she cocks her head. It's a mannerism that is so completely Tori, nonchalantly says to me, "To be coninued, once again. And no, Charlie, I do not smoke crack, I snort it."

I look at her like she is the crazy one and burst out laughing. "Gotcha!" she says as we part ways and head to class. — Heather Gunter

When the young woman
leans over the sky,
about to water the flowers as well as the weeds,
her white front splits open
until her milk runs. — Gunter Grass

I stand on victory ground for today. I claim all the work of the cross of Jesus, His resurrection power, His ascended authority, and Pentecost for all my victory. You are Lord of all my life this day. In Jesus' name, Amen. — Sylvia Gunter

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

Grownups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes, with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grownups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it. — Gunter Grass

As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things. — Gunter Grass

I kissed his forehead and then his temples. I kissed every place on his face all except his lips. I got close, but never full on the lips. I gave every place on his face my full attention. Maverick quietly said to me, "You missed a spot Charlie."
"I'm pretty sure I didn't," I replied.
"No Charlie, you did and I'm not waiting anymore for you to give it the attention that it so desperately deserves. — Heather Gunter

I have seen and drawn dying, poisoned worlds. I published a book of drawings called 'Death of Wood' about one such world, on the border between the Federal Republic of Germany and what was then still the German Democratic Republic. — Gunter Grass

If you take missions out of the Bible, you won't have anything left but the covers. — Nina Gunter