Peter > Peter's Quotes

“History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The Danube is not blue, as Karl Isidore Beck calls it in the lines which suggested to Strauss the fetching, mendacious title of his waltz. The Danube is blond, 'a szöke Duna', as the Hungarians say, but even that 'blond' is a Magyar gallantry, or a French one, since in 1904 Gaston Lavergnolle called it Le Beau Danube blond. More down to earth, Jules Verne thought of entitling a novel Le Beau Danube jaune. Muddy yellow is the water that grows murky at the bottom of these [the Strudlhof] steps.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Great poetry is capable of dealing with erotic passion, but it has to be the very greatest to represent that deeper and more tortuous love -- more rooted, more absolute -- which we devote to our children, and which it is so hard to talk about.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Speaking of the capitulation of Bulgaria, an event decisive to the outcome of the First World War and therefore to the end of a civilisation, Count Karolyi writes that while he was living through it he did not realise its importance, because "at that moment, 'that moment' had not yet become 'that moment'". The same is true in fiction for Fabrizio del Dongo, concerning the battle of Waterloo: while he is fighting it, it does not exist. In the pure present, the only dimension, however, in which we live, there is no history. At no single instant is there such a thing as the Fascist period or the October revolution, because in that fraction of a second there is only the mouth swallowing saliva, the movement of a hand, a glance at the window. ”
― Claudio Magris

“He [Mihaly Babits] hoped that some god might offer a bed to the river of words which rose to his lips, so that it might flow between ordered banks to the sea, there to vanish.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Conviction, as Michelstaedter wrote, is the present possession of one's own life and one's own person, the ability to live each moment to the full, not goading oneself madly into burning it up fast and using it with a view to an all too imminent future, thus destroying it in the hope that life -- the whole of life -- may pass swiftly.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“[E]very journey is played out between standstill and flight.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The courage to put an end to war, to see the abysmal stupidity of it, is certainly no less than that needed to start one.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The path to paradise begins in hell.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Today, questioning oneself about Europe means asking oneself how one relates to Germany.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Sorrow beyond dreams.”
― Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

“Fortune favours the brave.”
― Jeffrey Archer

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
― Eugene Ionesco

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
― T.S. Eliot

“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
― T.S. Eliot

“To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.”
― John Le Carre

“For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects.”
― Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography

“Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.”
― William Blake