Claudio Magris > Quotes

“History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“The Danube is not blue, as Karl Isidore Beck calls it in the lines which suggested to Strauss the fetching, mendacious title of his waltz. The Danube is blond, 'a szöke Duna', as the Hungarians say, but even that 'blond' is a Magyar gallantry, or a French one, since in 1904 Gaston Lavergnolle called it Le Beau Danube blond. More down to earth, Jules Verne thought of entitling a novel Le Beau Danube jaune. Muddy yellow is the water that grows murky at the bottom of these [the Strudlhof] steps.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Speaking of the capitulation of Bulgaria, an event decisive to the outcome of the First World War and therefore to the end of a civilisation, Count Karolyi writes that while he was living through it he did not realise its importance, because "at that moment, 'that moment' had not yet become 'that moment'". The same is true in fiction for Fabrizio del Dongo, concerning the battle of Waterloo: while he is fighting it, it does not exist. In the pure present, the only dimension, however, in which we live, there is no history. At no single instant is there such a thing as the Fascist period or the October revolution, because in that fraction of a second there is only the mouth swallowing saliva, the movement of a hand, a glance at the window. ”
― Claudio Magris

“The courage to put an end to war, to see the abysmal stupidity of it, is certainly no less than that needed to start one.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“[E]very journey is played out between standstill and flight.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“He [Mihaly Babits] hoped that some god might offer a bed to the river of words which rose to his lips, so that it might flow between ordered banks to the sea, there to vanish.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Conviction, as Michelstaedter wrote, is the present possession of one's own life and one's own person, the ability to live each moment to the full, not goading oneself madly into burning it up fast and using it with a view to an all too imminent future, thus destroying it in the hope that life -- the whole of life -- may pass swiftly.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Great poetry is capable of dealing with erotic passion, but it has to be the very greatest to represent that deeper and more tortuous love -- more rooted, more absolute -- which we devote to our children, and which it is so hard to talk about.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Time is not a single train, moving in one direction at a constant speed. Every so often it meets another train coming in the opposite direction, from the past, and for a short while that past is with us, by our side, in our present.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Η γνήσια λογοτεχνία δεν είναι εκείνη που κολακεύει τον αναγνώστη, επιβεβαιώνοντας τις προκαταλήψεις του, αλλά εκείνη που τον κεντρίζει και τον στριμώχνει, που τον αναγκάζει να ξαναλογαριαστεί με τον κόσμο του και με τις βεβαιότητές του.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“[...] forse non saremo veramente salvi finché non impareremo a sentire, con una concretezza quasi fisica, che ogni nazione è destinata ad avere la sua ora e che non ci sono, in senso assoluto, civiltà maggiori o minori, bensì un succedersi di stagioni e fioriture.

Danubio, p.33”
― Claudio Magris

“The great commander knows that in order to win one needs to know the remote and also the immediate reasons for the war, the capacities of the soldiers, which is to say the social and political make-up of the states, determining the variety, the quality and the character of the men.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Siempre te ha gustado escribir, no importaba el qué, escribir y ya está; es el gesto lo que cuenta, gesto de poeta, gesto de rey, soberano albedrío sobre las pobres vocales y consonantes que aparecena tus órdenes y se ponen en fila, march en, alienación derech, rompan filas.”
― Claudio Magris, Lei dunque capirà

“Our conventions humiliate the ass, inflicting on him beatings in real life and insults in our daily vocabulary. The ass pulls the cart, bears the burden, carries the weight of life; and life, we well know, is ungrateful and unjust towards those who come to its aid. Life allows itself to be carried away by rose-tinted novelettes and technicolor movies, and prefers radiant destinies to the plain prose of reality, so it is more taken with racehorses at Ascot than with humble donkeys on country roads.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“El desencanto es un oxímoron, una contradicción que el intelecto no puede resolver y que sólo la poesía puede expresar y custodiar”
― Claudio Magris, Utopía y desencanto: Historias, esperanzas e ilusiones de la modernidad

“Sabías que la poesía no es jamás sólo tuya, como el amor, sino de todos; no es el poeta el que crea las palabras, decías y declamabas, es la palabra la que se le hecha encima y le hace poeta...”
― Claudio Magris, Lei dunque capirà

“...al corazón no se le dan órdenes, decía, el corazón se rompe, y si se le dice que no se rompa se rompe igualmente, como el mío...”
― Claudio Magris, Lei dunque capirà

“The great commander can certainly move fast and strike like lightning, but his art of war consists first and foremost in moderation, measured geometric order, carefully weighed-up knowledge of circumstances and rules, a tranquil 'thinking things over'; without this there is little use in being acquainted with that 'infinity of situations' in which a soldier finds himself.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Judge not,' it has been said, but being a juryman can be a pleasant occupation when one is not weighing up human actions and years in prison, but the books or the wines of the season.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Today, questioning oneself about Europe means asking oneself how one relates to Germany.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“Suleika knows that she is only a passing moment, the crest of a wave or the hem of a cloud, but she is soberly content to be, do an instant, the embodiment of that flow.”
― Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

“I’ll end up believing, like him, that everything is war and every mark a scar. She ran a finger lightly over the blade of a sword temporarily hung on the wall; the line it left on her skin, though distinct, quickly vanished.”
― Claudio Magris, Blameless

“istoria este un abator si in orice excursie turistica sau calatorie instructiva in locurile bogate in istorie intra grosolana si cruda vulgaritate a celor care se bucura se suferinta altora ca de un spectacol.”
― Claudio Magris, L'infinito viaggiare

“No, no venia per salvar-me, sinó per ser salvat. Com podria cantar les meves cançons en terra estrangera?, em deia. Era jo la seva terra perduda, la saba que el feia florir, la saba de la seva vida. Venia per recuperar la seva terra, de la qual havia estat exiliat.”
― Claudio Magris

“One does not need a faith in God. Sufficient is a faith in created things, that enables one to move among objects in the conviction that they exist, persuaded of the irrefutable reality of this chair, this umbrella, this cigarette, this friendship. He who doubts himself is lost, just as someone scared of failure in love-making fails indeed. We are happy in the company of people who make us feel the unquestionable presence of the world, just as the body of the beloved gives us the certainty of those shoulders, that bosom, that curve of the hips, the surge of these as incontestable as the sea. And one who is in despair, we are taught by Singer, can act as though he believed: faith will come afterwards.”
― Claudio Magris

“A călători nu pentru a ajunge, ci pentru a călători, pentru a ajunge cât mai târziu posibil, pentru a nu ajunge, dacă se poate, niciodată.”
― Claudio Magris, L'infinito viaggiare