Elfriede Jelinek citations

Page 2

“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.”

“After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority. The middling level has no terrors, no anxieties. They huddle together, indulging in the illusion of warmth. If you’re alone with nothing, and certainly not yourself. And how content they are with that state of affairs!”

“When discussing Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos, the artistically aware person usually states, among other things, that when these masterpieces were composed, the stars were dancing in heavens. God and his dwelling place are always involved whenever these people talk about Bach.”

“Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire t destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure.”

“Money is unimportant, but it is reassuring to have it.”

“Don’t start anything you can’t finish.”

“There is no such thing as the universal ‘Man’ never has been, never will be, there is the worker and there is the one who exploits the worker and those who abet him.”

“Art and order, the relative that refuse to relate.”

“Happiness happens by chance, and is not a law or the logical consequences of actions.”

“There are photographs under the pistol, showing his mother genitals. These genitals make no perceptible impression on him, though it was through them that he first entered the world.”

“Intellectuals will still go on emphasizing free will even when they’ve got nothing left to eat.”