Daša Drndić > 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

“She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones.”
― Daša Drndić

“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

“And so it is that a new joie de vivre creeps into Ada's soul like a moth into a trunk of woollens.”
― Daša Drndić, Trieste

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

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

“We should probably be able to learn something from the repetition of history, repetitio est mater studiorum, but despite the fact that history stubbornly repeats itself, we are bad learners, and History, brazen and stubborn, does not desist, it goes right on repeating and repeating itself, I will repeat myself until I faint, it says, I will repeat myself to spite you, it says, until you finally come to your senses, it says, yet we do not come to our senses, we just grow our hair, hide and lie and feign innocence. Besides, for some of us, those of us who like Santa Claus lug sacks on our backs, sacks brimming with the sins of our ancestors, History has no need to return, History is in our marrow, and here, in our bones, it drills rheumatically and no medicine can cure that. History is in our blood and in our blood it flows quietly and destructively, while on the outside there's nothing, on the outside all is calm and ordinary, until one day, History, our History, the History in our blood, in our bones, goes mad and starts eroding the miserable, crumbling ramparts of our immunity, which we have been cautiously raising for decades.”
― Daša Drndić, Trieste

“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

“...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

“…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

“Ovdje ljudi rijetko se grle kad se sretnu na ulici, rijetko jedan drugog stegnu zdušno. A i što bi se grlili, ionako se stalno sreću. Ništa novo ne dešava se mjesecima, godinama. Netko tu i tamo umre, netko se rodi, netko se doseli, a iseljavaju se oni koji mogu ili moraju. Ne znam znači li to da ovdje nitko nikome ne nedostaje, da ovdje ljudi pate od nedostatka čežnje, pojma nemam, možda ima onih koji za nekim ili nečim čeznu, vjerojatno ima i takvih, pa bilo bi skroz bolesno, skroz nenormalno da ovdje ni jedne takve osobe nema.”
― Daša Drndić, Leica format

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“She knows that the end is a dream from which there is no waking.”
― Daša Drndić, Trieste

“Vojny sú veľké hry. Rozmaznaní chlapci po pestrých mapách posúvajú olovených vojačikov. (...) Keď sa hra skončí, bojovníci oddychujú. Prichádzajú historici, ktorí kruté hry nenásytných bezuzdníkov premieňajú na lož. Píše sa nová minulosť; tú budú noví vojvodcovia zakresľovať do nových máp, aby sa hra nikdy neskončila.”
― Daša Drndić

“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

“Šialenstvo je sen, z ktorého sa človek nebudí.”
― Daša Drndić

“Počinjem strahovati da u što god uložim srce, to izdahne.”
― Daša Drndić, Marija Czestochowska još uvijek roni suze ili Umiranje u Torontu

“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

“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

“We do not believe in any gods, especially not in supernatural gods. In fact, we have no faith, because it is faith we do not believe in. Least of all do we believe in the Catholic faith, it has sullied itself the most, it has defiled itself.”
― Daša Drndić, Trieste

“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

“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