Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

You have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.

Elfriede Jelinek
Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in.

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

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

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
Mother is afraid that Erika is thinking now, and she expresses her fear. A person who doesn't speak could easily be thinking. Mother demands that Erika reveal her thoughts, rather than let them eat into her. If Erika thinks anything, she has to tell Mother, to keep her informed. Mother is scared of silence.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
Art and order, the relative that refuse to relate.

Elfriede Jelinek
If someone has a fate, then it's a man, if someone gets a fate, then it's a woman.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

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

Elfriede Jelinek
The criteria of art are the imponderable, the immeasurable.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
A sensitive person gets burned, like a delicate moth.

Elfriede Jelinek
The rules of art do not exist, because what makes art art is the fact that it obeys no rules at all.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
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!

Elfriede Jelinek
Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.

Elfriede Jelinek
Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.

Elfriede Jelinek
It is not enough... simply to surrender oneself brainlessly to love, when it knocks at the door, one must also calculate because of later life, which does sometimes follow.

Elfriede Jelinek
After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it.

Elfriede Jelinek
Only he who loves and is loved for his own sake can be happy, and what produces that happiness is not so much the sense of sexual communion as of two people being together... the sexual act viewed as a whole probably affords less happiness than a totally ordinary kiss or often indeed one simple word from the one you love.

Elfriede Jelinek
Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong.

Elfriede Jelinek