The Tin Drum Quotes

“Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.”
― Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum

“Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“...I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“When Satan's not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn't even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“...if I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word 'doorknob', because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us...”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“What did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they could cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it?”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Thus my task was destruction.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“...there is also such a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn't God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Mamá sabía ser alegre. Mamá sabía ser temerosa. Mamá sabía olvidar fácilmente. Y, sin embargo tenía buena memoria. Mamá me daba con la puerta en la narices, y sin embargo, me admitía en su baño. A veces mamá se me perdía, pero su instinto me encontraba. Cuando yo rompía vidrios, mamá ponía la masilla. A veces se instalaba en el error, aunque a su alrededor hubiera sillas suficientes. Aun cuando se encerraba en sí misma, para mí siempre estaba abierta. Temía las corrientes de aire y sin embargo no paraba de levantar el viento. Gastaba, y no le gustaba pagar impuestos. Yo era el revés de su medalla. Cuando mamá jugaba corazones ganaba siempre. ”
― Günter Grass, El Tambor De Hojalata

“We struck up a conversation, taking pains at first to give it an easy flow and sticking to the most frivolous topics. Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would absolutely have to die, but he was less sure that all men had to be born...”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Once upon a time there was a musician who slew his four cats, stuffed them in a garbage can, left the building, and went to visit friends.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“They had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“I've also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“I’ve also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. All that may be true. But as far as I and my keeper Bruno are concerned, I beg to state that we are both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peephole, I in front of it; and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes.”
― Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Behind all sorrows in the world Klepp saw a ravenous hunger; all human suffering, he believed, could be cured with a portion of blood sausage. What quantities of fresh blood sausage with rings of onion, washed down with beer, Oskar consumed in order to make his friend think his sorrow's name was hunger and not Sister Dorothy.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Even bad books are books, and therefore holy.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“I wept when the muse Ulla bent over me. Blinded by tears I could not prevent her from kissing me, I could not prevent the Muse from giving me that terrible kiss. All of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that Oskar, once branded by that kiss, was condemned to take back the drum he had rejected years before, the drum he had buried in the sand of Sapse Cemetery.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Here was happiness; not my drum, to be sure, just an ersatz, but there is also a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Besides, my mama’s death had come as no great surprise to me. To Oskar, who accompanied her on Thursdays into the Altstadt and to the Church of the Sacred Heart on Saturdays, it seemed as if she’d been seeking a chance for years to dissolve her triangular relationship”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Gregor was a real drinker..he didn't drink because he was sad..(or) cheerful. He drank because he was a thorough man, who like to get to the bottom of things, of bottles as well as everything else.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“What more can I say: born beneath light bulbs, interrupted my growth at the age of three, was given a drum, sangshattered glass, smelled vanilla, coughed in churches, stuffed Luzie with food, watched ants as they crawled, decided to grow, buried the drum, moved to the West, lost what was East, learned to carve stone and posed as a model, went back to my drum and inspected concrete, made money and cared for the finger, gave the finger away and fled as I laughed, ascended, arrested, convicted, confined, now soon to be freed, and today is my birthday, I’m thirty years old, and still as afraid of the Black Cook as ever—Amen.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“If hell’s in store for us someday, one of its most refined forms of torture will be to lock a person naked in a room filled with framed photos of his era.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“The grim portrait of Beethoven hanging over the piano . . . was removed from its nail, and an equally grim portrait of Hitler was hung on the same nail. . . . Mama . . . insisted that Beethoven be placed, if not over the sofa, at least over the sideboard. This resulted in the grimmest of confrontations: Hitler and the genius hung opposite each other, stared at each other, saw through each other, yet found no joy in what they saw.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“...there is no such thing as a parttime partisan. Real partisans are partisans always and as long as they live. They put fallen governments back in power and overthrow governments that have just been put in power with the help of partisans. Mr Matzerath contended - and his thesis struck me as perfectly plausible - that among all those who go in for politics your incorrigible partisan, who undermines what he has just set up, is closest to the artist because he consistently rejects what he has just set up.”
― Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“Hoy ya sé que todo nos espía, que nada pasa inadvertido y que aun el papal pintado de las paredes tiene mejor memoria que los hombres. Y no es el buen Dios el que lo ve todo. No, una silla de cocina, una percha, ceniceros a medio llenar o la imagen de una mujer llamada Niobe bastan para proporcionar de todo acto un testimonio imperecedero.”
― Günter Grass, El Tambor De Hojalata