Elfriede Jelinek - Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

23 Sourced Quotes

View all Elfriede Jelinek Quotes
Time stands still for man and woman alike, it is a good moment, because Time usually makes everything worse, poor people grow old, rich people can buy a little time but they can'hold it up for good, it always catches up with them. In the last analysis, Time is democratic.

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

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

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
Money is unimportant, but it is reassuring to have it.

Elfriede Jelinek
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.

Elfriede Jelinek
The most powerful urge known to Man is the urge to be free of manual labour. Any means that accomplishes that end is fine. Some people erroneously imagine that they have a birthright to non-manual work.

Elfriede Jelinek
Weak are defeated by the strong in the world of Nature. A reed by the north wind, for instance. And silence by the forest.

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

Elfriede Jelinek
Intellectuals will still go on emphasizing free will even when they've got nothing left to eat.

Elfriede Jelinek
In this new era, what sets you free is knowledge, not work.

Elfriede Jelinek
Nothing is natural, yet everything is as it is by nature.

Elfriede Jelinek
In the old days people had no time to harm the environment because they were busy doing harm to themselves, in the War, for instance.

Elfriede Jelinek