Parsifal Quotes & Sayings

There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product. — Edmund White

Parsifal is on his way to the temple of the Grail Knights and says: "I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come", and the all-knowing Gurnemanz replies: "You see, my son, time turns here into space — Richard Wagner

I work to Glenn Gould in the morning and go to sleep listening to Parsifal. — Patti Smith

I guess I was seeking some balance in the wildlife of the city as Rachel Carson sought it in nature. In unbalanced times, balance is as difficult to come by as Parsifal's Grail. — Studs Terkel

I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. "You have to let me in," he says. "I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?" And they answer, "Well, we read it and it makes no sense." SLAM. — Philip K. Dick

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators. — Ann Patchett

I am writing Parsifal only for my wife - if I had to depend on the German spirit, I should have nothing more to say. — Richard Wagner

In the Great War, there is no room for the faint-hearted, the cowardly. A criminal or an anarchist will be better conditioned than a bourgeois, indecisive or cowardly man. They only need a push in the right direction. Only one who is born a hero or a warrior has a place in our order. Only the Lord of the Pure Will can march to the end, breaking in the gates of the City of Eternal Life. Because will, through its perseverance, creates the thing it contemplates. Only the Wild Hordes of Odin and Parsifal will achieve the Graal. — Miguel Serrano

In a certain sense, rebellion, with Nietzsche, ends again in the exaltation of evil. The difference is that evil is no longer a revenge. It is accepted as one of the possible aspects of good and, with rather more
conviction, as part of destiny. Thus he considers it as something to be avoided and also as a sort of
remedy. In Nietzsche's mind, the only problem was to see that the human spirit bowed proudly to the inevitable. We know, however, his posterity and what kind of politics were to claim the authorization of the man who claimed to be the last antipolitical German. He dreamed of tyrants who were artists. But tyranny comes more naturally than art to mediocre men. "Rather Cesare Borgia than Parsifal," he exclaimed. — Albert Camus

In Parsifal: You see, my son, here time turns into space. — Philip K. Dick

I must be alive," Gawain said hoarsely. "Dead doesn't hurt this much. — Gerald Morris