Happy birthday, Elias Canetti! Here are some quotes from the writer:
“Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past, it is too rich, you’re drowning in it, look at new people, pay attention to those who can no longer become models for you. Act on the word you have used more than any other: ‘transformation.'”
“A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.”
“Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?”
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort whatsoever.”
“It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.”
“I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.”
“I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.”
“There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.”
“There is something impure in the laments about the dangers of our time, as if they could serve to excuse our personal failure.”
“It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study.”
“Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning.”
“You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas—better to write down what refutes and weakens them!”
“You need the rhetoric of others, the aversion it inspires, in order to find the way out of your own.”
“The once-seen does not exist yet. The always seen no longer exists.”
“Is there still a possibility of public truth? The prime condition for that would be that you pose your own questions, not just answer them. The questions of others have a distorting influence, one adapts to them, accepts words and concepts that should be avoided at all costs. Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning.”
“One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others.”
“The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste.”
“Ambition is the death of thought.”
“You can tirelessly keep on reading the same author, revere, admire, praise him, exalt him to the skies, know and recite each of his sentences by heart, and yet remain completely unaffected by him, as if he had never demanded anything of you and not said anything at all.”
“A mind, lean in its own language. In others, it gets fat.”
“You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas—better to write down what refutes and weakens them!”
“One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.”
“Everything you rejected and pushed aside—take it up again.”
“Life experience” does not amount to very much and could be learned from novels alone, e.g., from Balzac, without any help from life.”
“If one has lived long enough, there is danger of succumbing to the word “God” merely because it was always there.”
“Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don’t be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper.”
“The unconscious, which those who always speak of it least possess.”
“One should tell oneself how fruitful misunderstandings are. One shouldn’t despise them. One of the wisest people was a collector of misunderstandings.”
“Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?”
“He who has too many words can only be alone.”
“You don’t lose anything by articulating your youth; between the sentences of remembrance, the neglected life makes itself felt and you find yourself richer by all that you’ve lost.”
“There is nothing to do but deceive the famous as well as fame itself.”
“It all depends on the rifts and leaps in a person, on the distance from the one to the other within himself.”
“To release a man into the languages of the world. He becomes wiser by the whole wealth of the incomprehensible. He avoids making a virtue of obscurity. But he feels it everywhere around him.”
“One can be nothing, can have failed in the most pathetic way, and yet be of some use by being consistent in just one thing.”
“More and more often he catches himself thinking that there is no way to save humanity. Is that an attempt to rid himself of responsibility?”
“A genuine praiser becomes isolated, otherwise his praise isn’t worth anything.”
“I know only one redemption: that what is endangered be kept alive, and at this moment o f redemption I do not ask myself how brief or how long it will be.”
“It took quite a while before I gained the conviction that there is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth. There is nothing to compare with words, their defacement torments me as if they were creatures capable of feeling pain. To me, a poet who does not know this is an incomprehensible being. But a language in which one is not allowed to create new words is in danger of suffocating: it constricts me.”
“When you write down your life, every page should contain some thing no one has ever heard about.”
“I can understand very well how someone might hate himself. What I can’t understand is someone’s hating himself and others. If he really hated himself, wouldn’t it give him comfort to know that they are not he?”
“Talk to yourself in every way—you, too, are a character—but know and never forget that you are one character among countless others, each of whom would have as much to talk about as you do.”
“One should use praise to recognize what one is not.”
“The certainty of first encounters: enthusiasm or condemnation. I cannot feel lukewarm or cold toward any new person. The encounter is my volcano.”
“More and more frequently, I am drawn to examine the words that I carry within myself; they occur to me singly, coming from different languages, and then I wish for nothing more than to reflect on a single such word for a long time. I hold it before me, turn it around; I handle it like a stone, but a marvelous stone, and the earth in which it was embedded is myself.”
“To imagine a kind of disappearance that conquers death.”
“In music, words swim—words that usually walk. I love the pace of words, their paths, their stops, their stations; I mistrust their flowing.”
“To write until, in the joy of writing, one no longer believes one’s own unhappiness.”
“Seek as long as there still is something in you; remember, give yourself willingly to remembrance, do not scorn it, it is the best and most truthful thing you have, and everything you neglect in memory is lost and gone forever.”
“Sentences in one word. Endless sentences.”
“A better way of listening: listen to the unexpected, no longer knowing what one is listening to.”
“No poet comes into being without the disorder of reading.”
“The modest task of the poet may in the end be the most important one: to transmit what he has read.”
“This senseless examination of what language cannot do, when it is still doing the worst kind of damage.”
“Oh, to be a book, a book that is read with such passion!”
“A language in which no questions are asked. Yawn lines instead of question marks.”
“What is the use of remembering? Live now! Live now! But my only reason for remembering is to live now.”
“Prophecy is malicious deception. The prophet’s power resides in malice. All transgressions fill him with rancor. He cannot undo them and pins a threat to each one. So many transgressions, so many threats; there are unfortunately more than enough. Can
you imagine anything more disgusting than a prophet? But why call the prophet a deceiver? The prophet’s obsession is his legitimation, and he takes his threat seriously. The deception lies in the belief in his calling, it begins with self-deception. But once he has found an audience, he will use any deception to keep that audience. He is in thrall to his own warning voice.”
“Try not to judge. Describe. There is nothing more disgusting than condemnation. It’s always this way or that and it’s always wrong. Who knows enough to judge another? Who is selfless enough?”
“Before it turns into decay, death is confrontation. Courage to face it, in defiance of all futility. Courage to spit death in the face.”
“To disappear, but not completely, so that you can know it.”
“To live in secret. Could there be anything more wonderful?”
“The most unbearable thing is having to narrow yourself down: having to spend too much time with a person who guards his limits. It could be someone whose honesty coincides with his limits and who protects his narrowness against restlessness, but also against evil. But it doesn’t help much to be aware of that: for one who is after truth, even the neatest narrowness is intolerable. He races along the borders and curses their impassibility.”
“To obfuscate the end or intensify it: no other choice.”
