Elfriede Jelinek: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

“Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner.”

“The world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egotistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates.”

“One suffers work, even if one enjoys doing it.”

“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.”

“Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back.”

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

“The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude.”

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

“We are monsters, even if we disguise ourselves as ordinary people. We are the children of ordinary people but we are not content with that. Inwardly we are consumed with wickedness, outwardly we are grammar school pupils.”

“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.”