16 Quotes by Daša Drndić

...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.

…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.

Every novel is about salvation, says Bela Hamvas, there is no novel without confession.

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.

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

We react squeamishly to shit, don’t we? But if we look into the matter you’ll see that it’s the most valuable substance on earth, all life comes from shit and returns to shit.

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.