Thomas Bernhard: Frost

"It’s not a good cast of human being here,” he said. “The people are relatively short. The infants are given ‘brandy rags’ to suck, to keep them from screaming… Alcohol has displaced milk. They all have high squeaky voices. Most of them are crippled in one form or another. All of them are conceived in drunkenness. For the most part criminal characters… Child abuse, killings, are Sunday afternoon stuff… The animals are better off: after all, what people would really like is a pig, not a kid"

"One man thinks pretty much what the man next to him thinks: the human porridge of the traffic accident, weeks ago, or years..."

... A year ago, he took over from a man who died of septicemia. “He scratched himself with a fawn’s bone."

"My notion of infinity is the same as the one I had when I was three years old. Less than that. It begins where your eyes end. Where everything ends. And it never begins."

"The world isn't the world, it's a zero."

"You know," the painter said, "that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy... Envy is what holds artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything... I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions... I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they were always the great, the very great, the very greatest emetics... Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum?"

"What goes on in a brain that conceives itself to be the centre of the world. Millions of lights going on and off in millions of centres! That's the world. That's all it is."

"You are molested wherever you go”, said the painter. “It’s as if everyone had conspired to bother you. An instinct that rages through them all like wildfire. Against you. You wake up, and you feel molested. In fact: the hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers: a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast!"

"Worth is worthlessness, the calamity of worthlessness is the worthlessness of one’s own world and of the world unconnected to one’s own."