Danube 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

“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

“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

“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

“[E]very journey is played out between standstill and flight.”
― 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

“To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Η γνήσια λογοτεχνία δεν είναι εκείνη που κολακεύει τον αναγνώστη, επιβεβαιώνοντας τις προκαταλήψεις του, αλλά εκείνη που τον κεντρίζει και τον στριμώχνει, που τον αναγκάζει να ξαναλογαριαστεί με τον κόσμο του και με τις βεβαιότητές του.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Time is not a single train, moving in one direction at a constant speed. Every so often it meets another train coming in the opposite direction, from the past, and for a short while that past is with us, by our side, in our present.”
― 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

“It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“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

“Our conventions humiliate the ass, inflicting on him beatings in real life and insults in our daily vocabulary. The ass pulls the cart, bears the burden, carries the weight of life; and life, we well know, is ungrateful and unjust towards those who come to its aid. Life allows itself to be carried away by rose-tinted novelettes and technicolor movies, and prefers radiant destinies to the plain prose of reality, so it is more taken with racehorses at Ascot than with humble donkeys on country roads.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Judge not,' it has been said, but being a juryman can be a pleasant occupation when one is not weighing up human actions and years in prison, but the books or the wines of the season.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The great commander knows that in order to win one needs to know the remote and also the immediate reasons for the war, the capacities of the soldiers, which is to say the social and political make-up of the states, determining the variety, the quality and the character of the men.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The great commander can certainly move fast and strike like lightning, but his art of war consists first and foremost in moderation, measured geometric order, carefully weighed-up knowledge of circumstances and rules, a tranquil 'thinking things over'; without this there is little use in being acquainted with that 'infinity of situations' in which a soldier finds himself.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“À Sulina arrivent maintenant tous les débris que le Danube transporte. Dans son roman Europolis, qui date de 1933, Jean Bart, alias Eugen P. Botez, voit les destinées humaines elles-mêmes aborder à Sulina comme les épaves d'un naufrage ; la ville, comme le dit le nom qu'il lui a inventé, vit encore dans un halo d'opulence et de splendeur, c'est un port situé sur de grandes routes, un endroit où se rencontrent des gens venus de pays lointains et où on rêve, en on entrevoit, on manie mais surtout on perd la richesse.
Dans ce roman la colonie grecque, avec ses cafés, est le décor de cette splendeur à son déclin, à laquelle la Commission du Danube confère une dignité politico-diplomatique, ou du moins un semblant. Le livre, toutefois, est une histoire d'illusion, de décadence, de tromperie et de solitude, de malheur et de mort ; une symphonie de la fin, dans laquelle cette ville qui se donne des allures de petite capitale européenne devient bas-fond, rade abandonnée.
(p. 533)”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Toda e qualquer vida se decide na capacidade de crença ou na sua ausência, toda e qualquer viagem se joga entre a pausa e a fuga.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“A História só adquire a sua realidade mais tarde, quando já passou, e as ligações gerais, instituídas e escritas nos anais anos depois, conferem a um acontecimento o seu alcance e o seu papel. Recordando a derrocada búlgara, acontecimento decisivo para o desfecho da Primeira Guerra Mundial e portanto para o fim de uma civilização, o conde Károlyi escreve que, enquanto o vivia, não dera conta da sua importância, porque, «nesse momento, “esse momento” não se transformara ainda “nesse momento”».”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“There is very little light and the hand-rail is rusty, but in the shadows on every landing there are statues, majestic and banal, with that mystery which envelopes the most conventionally imitative and realistic art - the art which creates figures aping the trite transparency of persons in official poses. The arabesques of the Alhambra, or Michelangelo's Prisoners, are there for eternity, while the imposing, melancholy statues on this staircase, insignificant as ourselves, grow old like us, moulder away in this semi-darkness amid the understandable neglect of all and sundry. They exhibit the uselessness and solitude, the incomprehensibility of old age.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The honeyed sweetness of Mengele, of his words and of his smile, which he hoped would endow him with some resemblance to the Angel of Death, is the genuine, imbecile expression of every kind of fascination with evil; it is the expression featured in every demi-culture that expects the shoddy junk of the shadows to make amends for its own paltriness. The prohibited act, often as trite as throwing rubbish out of the window, is no less obtuse just because it torments or tortures. The Gorgon, said Joseph Roth about Nazism, is banal. Mengele's victims are characters in a tragedy, but Mengele himself is a figure in a farrago of gibberish.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“I deboli devono imparare a far paura ai forti ossia ad accorgersi che - se vogliono, se si liberano dalla paura - possono essere forti anch'essi e restituire alla signora Luner bastonara per bastonata. Chi si piega a servire, lo fa perché, come l'elefante di Kipling, ha dimenticato la propria forza. Quando se ne sarà ricordato e sarà pronto a dare un bel colpo di proboscide al primo che si prova a punzecchiarlo, ci sarà forse pace nello zoo.
(Danubio, 1997, p. 236)”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The past has a future, something it becomes, and that transforms it. Like the facts themselves, the person, the "I", who experiences it and looks back on it discovers that it is not singular, but plural. Traveling through those places marked down in those epic chronicles of thirty years ago, one gets the impression of slicing through paper-thin, invisible barriers, different levels of reality, still present and with us even though not discernible to the naked eye, infrared or ultraviolet rays of history, images and instants that at this point cannot print an image on the celluloid, but which nonetheless are, and exist in the same way for tangible experience as electrons which elude our grasp.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Suleika knows that she is only a passing moment, the crest of a wave or the hem of a cloud, but she is soberly content to be, do an instant, the embodiment of that flow.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“If a man without a woman, as it says in a passage in the Talmud dear to the heart of Kafka, is not a man, then it is Amshel who became a man, even though on the point of death, but it is Franz who narrates this odyssey and teaches us how to become Amshel, how to become a man.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea