Elfriede Jelinek: Trending quotes (page 2)

“weak are defeated by the strong in the world of Nature. A reed by the north wind, for instance. And silence by the forest.”

“Death the Laveller annihilates all distinctions.”

“For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.”

“For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise people will suppose the soul is done for.”

“There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist.”

“The poet is a king in his realm. His is empire of imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions.”

“nothing comes of nothing after all.”

“First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to listen to pop, rock, and punk.”

“Stifter tells us that people are not free, that they are slaves to the laws of Nature. So you have to commit violent deeds (if you don’t have anyone to do other kinds of deeds with), actions that ordinary people would call crimes but which we define as the norm, though of course it is our norm and no that of the rest.”

“Every man would like to possess all the women in the world, but a woman only wants the man she loves and to whom she is faithful.”

“Work is not a constraint. Man's activity provides his true fulfilment. True fulfilment however, can only be achieved if one man is not another man's slave.”

“Art is not a Trojan horse.”

“Murder and assault are not lunacy; they are the logical conclusions if you live a life without an assured financial foundation.”

“Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in.”

“if someone has a fate, then it's a man, if someone gets a fate, then it's a woman.”

“Rainer [protagonist in the novel], who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplated san evening he says that evening is melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to and end.”

“In this new era, what sets you free is knowledge, not work.”

“In the case of a writer like Musil writing is often a graceful act, like a silvery fish leaping.”

“Beethoven’s sonatas, whether show so much variety that one has to ask oneself the fundamental question of what the much vilified word ‘sonata means. Perhaps Beethoven applied the word to entities that are not even sonatas in the strict sense of the term. One has to perceive new law in the highly dramatic musical form. Often in the sonata, feeling eludes form. In Beethoven, that is not the case, for here the two go hand in hand; feeling makes form aware of a hole in the ground and vice versa.”