Ewout > Ewout's Quotes

“You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.

Your suicide was scandalously beautiful…

You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.”
― Edouard Levé, Suicide

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”
― J.D. Salinger

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I soon understood self-hatred to mean an internalized, though not necessarily conscious, loathing of one's recognizable group markings that culminates either in quasi-pathological efforts to expunge them or in the vicious disparagement of those who don't even know enough to try.”
― Philip Roth

“Als we iemand haten dan haten we in zijn beeld iets dat in onszelf huist. Wat niet in onszelf huist, windt ons niet op.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Die individuele vrijheden vormden wat mij betreft geen probleem van de moderne westerse samenleving, maar een verworvenheid, terwijl het werkelijke probleem gelokaliseerd kon worden in de ten onrechte als vrijheid verkochte kernwaarden van de wereldwijde religie van het neoliberalisme, die egoïsme als een deugd beschouwt en altruïsme als een zwakte.”
― Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Grand Hotel Europa

“You break
From earthly approval
And common urges:
Then soar, accordingly”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works

“Wij zijn er immers aan gewend geraakt onder moed alleen militaire moed te verstaan (alla, eventueel nog die van ruimtevaarders), de moed die met ordetekens rammelt. We zijn een andere vorm van moed vergeten: de burgerlijke; en dié! dié! dié! heeft onze maatschappij alleen maar nodig! die komt alleen maar niet voor bij ons...”
― Solzjenitsyn, Alexander

“The truth is we don't know what we're doing. We don't know where it's going to lead. It's a known fact that children of divorce are over-represented in the crime figures, and the younger they were when the parents divorced, the greater the risk of them getting into trouble. But we won't give up the right to divorce, so instead we say it's best for the kids. In any system it's impossible to foresee all effects. To get back to the motor car: if anyone had said that the invention of the motor car was going to kill thousands of people every year, would we have put it into production and centred our lives around it the way we have? No. So we don't talk about that, we say the motor car brings us freedom and opportunity instead. And when capitalism increased its hold and we needed more labour, did anyone say women have got to leave the home now and start producing goods, so we can double the labour force? Not to mention double the numbers of consumers? No, they didn't. That was comen wanting the same rights as men. The right to work, what kind of a right is t hat? How's that supposed to be liberating? It's just the opposite, a prison. The consequence of that is that our kids are farmed out to an institution from the age of two, and what happens then? Mum and dad are almost driven insane, aren't they? They're riddled with guilt, so they spend all the time they can on their kids when they're not at work, trying to be as close to them as possible. Compensation, compensation, compensation.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“The way enlightenment became blind to itself, what began as a de-enchantment of reality, designed to make man free and his own master, ending up in re-enchantment, at the same time as progress, with all its advances and technologies, marched on, making man unfree and slavelike, and eventually it collapsed completely.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“If we accord the highest value to the life of the individual, if we understand life to be a quantitative concept that must be maintained for as long as possible, then death is our foremost enemy and war becomes absolutely meaningless, absolutely undersirable. If we do not accord the highest value to the life of the individual, but to some element of that life, a property, or to something outside of it, an idea, then we consider life as something qualitative, something more than the sum of cells and living days, in other words we hold that there is something more hallowed than life, and then the equation is simple and one might choose to die for it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 6

“Now that Nazism has become 'they', it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case when Nazism was 'we'. If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first. And we must understand too that Nazism in its various elements was not monstrous in itself, by which I mean that it did not arise as something obviously monstrous and evil, separate from all else in the current society, but was on the contrary part of that current. The gas chambers were not a German invention, but were conceived by Americans who realised that people could be put to death by placing them in a chamber infused with posionous gas, a procedure they carried out for the first time in 1919. Paranoid anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon either, the world's most celebrated and passionate anti-Semite in 1925 being not Adolf Hitler but Henry Ford. And racial biology was not an abject, shameful discipline pursued at the bottom of society or its shabby periphery, it was the scientific state of the art, much as genetics is today, haloed by the light of the future and all its hope. Decent humans distanced themselves from all this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbours and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as 'they', in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as 'we'. It will come as what is right.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 6

“²If there is another life after this one, I would like very much, in the next one, to be the sort of person of whom it could be truly said, 'Forgive him - he knows not what he does.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“As the war drew to a close, Heinz and I couldn't drink in our pillbox any more. An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz's late wife - boys that young, and yet with men's uniforms and a fully armed death-trap all their own.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“You hate America, don't you?'

That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Niets is erger dan de herhaling van iets dat bij eerste optreden al voortreffelijk was. Het betekent de vernieting van de voortreffelijkheid.”
― A.F.Th. van der Heijden, Het leven uit een dag

“He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. "Hate to do this, Bill," he said of the fungi he was murdering. "Fungi have as much right to life as I do. they know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore."
Then he thought about what Bill himself might want. It was easy to guess. "Bill," he said, "I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true." He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn't have done in a thousand years.
Bill flew over to the windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. there was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trough was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode.
"Your second wish is about to come true," said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. he opened the window. But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside.
Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. "That's the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of," he told the bird. "You made sure you'd still have something worth wishing for--to get out of the cage.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Of course, if we had a woman of breeding age omong us, that might change the situation radically. Poor old Hazel is years beyond having even a Mongolian idiot.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Wat een - hoe zal ik het zeggen - verblindend iets was dat hoongelach. Het wrede, bij hun leeftijd passende gelach van mijn klasgenoten leek mij een felle schittering te zijn als van licht, dat van een bundel baderen terugkaatst.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“Ik geloof dat ons Europa door toedoen van Amerika eentoniger, gemêleerder, aangepaster en eenvormiger wordt, zodat in het uitgerolde deeg weldra nog nauwelijks iets te merken valt van het pikante, opzwepende aroma jood: types passen zich aan in een duizelingwekkend tempo (kijk in elk tijdschrijft) aan elkaar aan. Misschien houdt men het antisemitisme in stand alleen maar door het te benoemen. Vergelijk het met Oostenrijk: iets non-existents werd zo lang positief bevestigd dat het uiteindelijk in de geesten is gaan leven en dat er nog steeds residu's en suggesties van dat patriottistische kunstproduct in ons bloed rondwaren. Hoe meer men problemen ter sprake brengt, hoe meer belang eraan gehecht wordt: de oplossing voor het joodse vraagstuk is (helaas) dat alle verschillen in onze steeds sneller ronddraaiende Europese reageerbuis worden opgelost.”
― Stefan Zweig

“We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan's footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession. Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger's sojourn?”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“Man has made himself free, terribly and dizzyingly free. Religion and art are kept alive for the sake of sentimentality, as a conventional politeness toward the past, a benevolent solicitude of leisure's increasingly nervous citizens.”
― Ingmar Bergman

“De bruiloft was in Monterey, een sombere, dreigende plechtigheid in een klein, Protestants kerkje. De kerk had al zo dikwijls twee rijpe lichamen zien afsterven door middel van het huwelijk, dat zij in het ritueel een mystieke, dubbele dood scheen te vieren. Jozef en Elizabeth voelden beiden de gemelijkheid van het vonnis. 'Gij zult verduren" zei de kerk; en haar muziek was een profetie zonder een sprankje zon.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“I’m gettin’ tired way past where sleep rests me.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“The houses were left vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath