EEG Quotes

“War, along with fear, reaches you in an instant. It penetrates walls, it moves over mountains, through rivers. It enters the human mind, human hearts, human souls. It settles there and will not leave.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“What to do with the lives around us, within us? How to classify them? They are and are not examined lives, monochrome canvases with blots, smudges, freckles scattered over a space made up of shackled time.
Examined lives (canvases), crisscrossed with shallow empty spaces, dappled with little bumps—hillocks—and narrow furrows, cuttings, grooves, many alike, in which slow, stagnant waters swirl. Lives with rounded edges, easily catalogued, easily connected, easily nailed onto the shelves of memory. And forgotten there.
Then, those others: lives crisscrossed, entangled, knotted wit veins, scars, clefts which continue to breathe under the gravestones over the little mounds of our being, scabbed-over wounds that still bleed within. Impenetrable lives. They flicker in the darkness, sending out little sparks of light, fluorescent, like the bones of corpses.
Placed side by side, there is no current between them, because both these kinds of life collapse into themselves, silently and menacingly like rising waters.
Kaleidoscopic lives. Like the drawings of schizoid patients.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“So, at funerals you learn all kinds of things. One corpse is laid to rest in the earth, another climbs out.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“Subtle distinctions of pronunciation in our language are being lost and words are becoming slimy, spoken often with an idiotic smile as speakers fashionably soften nonexistent consonants. Degenerate. Like children, half-articulate, vacuous, infantile orators roll words around their mouths like hot potatoes, as though they were toothless, they shift them about, squash them, then open their mouths to eject a mash, a sticky pre-masticated porridge, which slides down their chins.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“It is damaging to tie yourself. To a country and a home. Sooner or later both will fuck you up.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“A view of the sea drives people crazy—in a positive sense, it calms them, but it disturbs them too. There must be some atavistic link between the eye, the soul and water, extensive waters of mystic depths and an inaccessible, dark bottom. Some connections quiver, are inexplicable.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“Here’s a window onto madness. Our planet is a cosmic madhouse, said Goethe as much as a hundred years and more ago, to which Nietzche, while he was still of sound mind,... added: With individuals madness is rare; but with groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“I’ve read some extracts from those idiocies of Knausgaard’s, absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is riddled with holes,”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“When one writes, it helps to repeat oneself. It’s even desirable to transpose whole passages from one book to another, which is what I do from time to time, because people are chronically forgetful.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG

“Every novel is about salvation, says Bela Hamvas, there is no novel without confession.”
― Daša Drndić, EEG