Belladonna Quotes

“Memories die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they burst, lose color, lose suppleness, stiffen like corpses. All that remains are shells with translucent edges. Half-erased brain platelets are a slippery terrain, deceptive. One’s mental archive is locked, it languishes in the dark. The past is riddled with holes, souvenirs can’t help here. Everything must be thrown away. Everything. And perhaps everyone as well.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“...the intellectual is a person who nurtures, preserves and propagates independent judgment, a person loyal exclusively to truth, a courageous and wrathful individual for whom no force of this world is too great or too frightening not to be subjected to scrutiny and called to account.

... A true intellectual, a genuine one, is always an outsider, …he is a person who lives in self-imposed exile on the margins of society.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“The provincial spirit does not like the unfamiliar. That is one of its fundamental attributes, defining its history, its culture, its mental world. Provincial life is a life of routine. The provincial spirit is a tribal spirit with no awareness of the individual.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Sometimes it is as if Andreas Ban sees Lethe rise from its bed and splash the porous ramparts of memory. Flooding fields, cities and people. And when it decides to withdraw, it drags after it carpets of the past and the shaky present and buries them in its dense silt. And he hears Hypnos and Thanatos shading the world with the fluttering of their wings. Then he ought perhaps to reach for poets.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Individual destinies sink, small lives merge into one great false mass event that keeps repeating its statistical story.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“...wars are orgies of forgetfulness. The twentieth century has archived vast catacombs, tunnels of information in which researchers get lost and in the end abandon their research, catacombs that ever fewer people enter. Stored away---forgotten. The twentieth century, a century of great tidying that ends in cleansing; the twentieth century, a century of cleansing, a century of erasure. Language perhaps remains, but it too is crumbling.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“The philosophy of the province is a philosophy of a closed circle that does not allow an apostasy, without which there is no creativity. The philosophy of the province is a normative and normalizing, suprapersonal and impersonal philosophy, it shuts out all aspects of life, education, sport, nutrition, nature, love, work, language, religion and death (which is far from being the death of an individual) replacing life with rigid forms of the normative which apply to all.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“...it is precisely about things which it is impossible to speak of that one must speak…”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“..it is a deaf age of defiled silence through which pigs grunt as they stampede over the paving stones of memory.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Writing is an occupation in which you must prove your talent to those who have none.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“…he sees a play by Arthur Kopit, he doesn’t remember the title, something about the way a lie becomes the truth and the truth a lie.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“The future lies in unimaginable solitude — one of the elements of which is play, which sounds nice but is blasé and pretentious, because playing in poverty does not bring any comfort — it brings destruction,”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“the intellectual is a person who nurtures, preserves and propagates independent judgment, a person loyal exclusively to truth, a courageous and wrathful individual for whom no force of this world is too great or too frightening not to be subjected to scrutiny and called to account”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Memories die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they burst, lose color, lose suppleness, stiffen like corpses.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“...when I see the other, I understand myself. To understand myself, to respect myself, I have to respect the other, because I am the other. And responsibility for the other is a fundamental human value. Without it, we become monsters.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“We react squeamishly to shit, don’t we? But if we look into the matter you’ll see that it’s the most valuable substance on earth, all life comes from shit and returns to shit.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Old age and memory weave themselves into time and come increasingly to resemble braids; time is in fact a whirlpool in which past and present events circle, prehistory and posthistory, in an eternal embrace. And as the future collapses, as there is in fact no future, the time that is coming is wrapped in the past like a scroll becoming the underground world of the future, a world obsessed with everything old. And so empires collapse, the leaders of ages parade like statesmen, and under their equipment people become invisible. Therefore, no stories emerge from a disintegrated past, only lifeless images. There is no construction without stitches, everywhere there are fragments, because it is out of ruins, out of wrecks, out of discarded parts that new comes into being.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“They talked about the way society is in fact controlled through the imposition of false needs, and how criticism of society is effectively and systematically suppressed by being infiltrated into institutions. They spoke of a closed technological society which creates a new totalitarianism, and in it there is no place for those outside the process of production. About the fact that the only way out of the comfortable, rationalized, undemocratic freedom offered by developed industrial civilization is through rebellion. About the fact that revolution is possible only through awareness but that awareness in itself demands revolution.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“In other words, melancholy would be a pathological form of mourning, a sick flight from reality, a flight from the outside world into a refuge, into the inner world of the psyche. What if reality is sick, what then? What if the inner world is destroyed, in ruins and robbed, where to then? So, in grief, the world becomes poor and empty, while in melancholy the ego is like some kind of abandoned archaeological discovery that has been dug up. Yes, the melancholic is a radical atheist who in his hollow discourse worships a dead god.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“...we are all traveling along parallel tracks, tracks that touch for only an instant through the crazed sparks that scatter from under the wheels of an eternally rushing train.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Bolničkim hodnikom kotrlja se mali strah umotan u perje.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Palanka se fanatično boji svijeta jer se boji kaosa.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Andreas Ban would like to put several swifts on his chest to rest, to breathe with him like sleeping children.
Little black birds like cheerful death. Painless.
Little black birds with big eyes and a small beak, which peck noiselessly at his insides, see what is there and are silent.
Andreas Ban stretches his arms toward the sky, imagining that he is flying, imagining himself in a flock of swifts and lets out a stifled cry.
Small birds, they die when they are alone.
He, Andreas Ban, is alone.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“What is left for him? He will after all form an alliance with the doctors, cooperate with the machines, with that Oncor and Mevatron, he will hand over his body to others, share its functions with others, entirely rationally, entirely in the spirit of Western civilization which treasures control.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna