Rave Quotes

“You couldn't get the text by just starting with the meaning, it had to be conceived differently, through prayer, through the endless iterative pronunciation of the words with the mouth, becoming as it were part of the words oneself by speaking.
'What?'
That was how the thought happened. That was how everyone always made it happen.”
― Rainald Goetz, Rave

“Reckless as it might have been, at the same time this experience was yearning to understand itself. And yet wanting at the same moment to forget itself again, to destroy understanding, to have some new experience reveal that understanding to be nonsense invalidated through novelty, tumult, coolness.”
― Rainald Goetz, Rave

“.. we just went on with everything because everything was still going on and the music emerged softly from the room where the others were sleeping and so we sat there in the mild glow of the early summer morning for hours, endlessly, and talked and talked.
Or something like that. That's how the stories always went everywhere, no?”
― Rainald Goetz, Rave

“The years. Dreadfully the years flowed off downstream. They came and went, and calmly and unspectacularly, unnoticeably performed their steady work of annihilation in people's lives. It turned to summer, winter came, and all at once the upcoming year was standing at the door.
Hey there! I want in. I want to destroy you.
Each. And every one of you.
So it did. The years spoke, but we heard nothing. We sat at our tables and talked, went on standing around, at the bars, at the doors to the clubs, and we just kept talking. On and on we carried on talking about the business. Nothing had changed, really, yet everything was different.
The interior of our minds had somehow gone bust.”
― Rainald Goetz, Rave