16 Quotes by Daša Drndić

What is left for him? He will after all form an alliance with the doctors, cooperate with the machines, with that Oncor and Mevatron, he will hand over his body to others, share its functions with others, entirely rationally, entirely in the spirit of Western civilization which treasures control.

...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.

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.

..it is a deaf age of defiled silence through which pigs grunt as they stampede over the paving stones of memory.

...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.

Individual destinies sink, small lives merge into one great false mass event that keeps repeating its statistical story.

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.

Andreas Ban would like to put several swifts on his chest to rest, to breathe with him like sleeping children.Little black birds like cheerful death. Painless.Little black birds with big eyes and a small beak, which peck noiselessly at his insides, see what is there and are silent. Andreas Ban stretches his arms toward the sky, imagining that he is flying, imagining himself in a flock of swifts and lets out a stifled cry. Small birds, they die when they are alone.He, Andreas Ban, is alone.

...when I see the other, I understand myself. To understand myself, to respect myself, I have to respect the other, because I am the other. And responsibility for the other is a fundamental human value. Without it, we become monsters.