103 Quotes by Elfriede Jelinek

Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!

Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.

After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it.

Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong.

Anna despises two classes of people: first, those who own their own homes and have cars and families, and second, everybody else. Constantly she is on the verge of exploding. With rage. A pool of pure red. The pool is filled with speechlessness that talks away at her nonstop.

Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.

Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.

It is not enough ... simply to surrender oneself brainlessly to love, when it knocks at the door, one must also calculate because of later life, which does sometimes follow.

Only he who loves and is loved for his own sake can be happy, and what produces that happiness is not so much the sense of sexual communion as of two people being together ... the sexual act viewed as a whole probably affords less happiness than a totally ordinary kiss or often indeed one simple word from the one you love.