Austrian Playwright Quotes

Elfriede Jelinek

Arthur Schnitzler

Peter Handke

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Hermann Broch

I have often been told, on the occasion of the publication of some important scientific work, that 'whatever there is true in it is not new, and what is new is not true.' This means in plain language: 'we understand what we know, but that which we ought to know, we do not understand.'

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!

Elfriede Jelinek

Happy is he who can forget what cannot be changed.

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

The main thing:... not to let myself be defined by history, not to take it as an excuse—despise it in those who hide their personal insignificance behind it—and yet know it, in order to understand people and above all to see through them (my hatred of history as a refuge for be-nothings).

Sleep does make us all equal, it seems to me, like his big brother-Death.

Arthur Schnitzler

Without a doubt the sense of beauty does not lie determined in the concreteness of an individual beautiful thing or person. Rather its purpose is much more the enchantment of the soul, for there is nothing physical that is not made with the intent of affecting the soul, and there is no soul that does not intend to dazzle everything physical with its sensations.

Alexander Lernet-Holenia