Thomas Bernhard: Gargoyles

Thomas Bernhard: Concrete

Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.


Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.


The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me - I have no others. And I'd always found it hard to have any relationship with another person - I wouldn't think of using such an unappetizing word as friendship, a word which is misused by everybody. And even early in my life there were times when I had no one - I at least knew that I had no one, though others were always asserting that I did have someone. They said, You do have someone, whereas I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but - what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought - needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick - impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word.


Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.


I must have made a pitiful, indeed pitiable impression on an observer, though there was none – unless I'm going to say that I am an observer of myself, which is stupid, since I am my own observer anyway: I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists only of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself. But all the time I ask myself what I have to save myself from?


I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs.


We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money....


Time destroys everything we do, whatever it is.


On the one hand we can't be alone, people like us; on the other we can't stand company. We can't stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it's totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time.


People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men — to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment — when in fact it is purely and simply a question of finding their way to themselves. Let each first find his way to himself! And since hardly anyone has yet found his way to himself, it is inconceivable that any of these unfortunate millions has ever found his way to another human being — or to his neighbour, as they say, dripping with self-deception.

Elfriede Jelinek: Women as Lovers

you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.


perfectly happy momma goes out into the fields. she eavesdrops on herself, in case somewhere deep inside a melody rings out or a blackbird sings, but all that she hears, is only the cancer, which saws and eats away at her.

Josef Winkler: When the Time Comes

Catalogue of deaths in provincial Austrian backwater.

... who even today venerates Hitler and who, by way of punishment, used to make his daughter Karin – not yet 20 – go alone to the cesspit with a long-handled ladle to gather faeces and throw them into the manure tanker with a rusty bucket, until bloody blisters formed on her hands.


"A deep chasm divides us. None of us can go to you and none of you can come to us."


Willibald, who had worked for decades in the Heraklith factory on the other bank of the Drava, was dead from long cancer. His hands in the air and his pants around his ankles, he stepped out of the bathroom and called [to his wife]: Hilde! Hilde! Help me! then fell over and died on the spot.


The two boys tied the two ends of rope behind their ears and jumped into the emptiness, weeping and embracing, a few meters from the armless Christ who had once been rescued from a stream bed by the priest and painter of prayer cards. ... With their tongues out, their sexes stiff, their semen-flecked pants dripping urine, Jonathan in pajamas and Leopold in his quicklime-splattered bricklayer's clothes, they hung in the barn of the parish house until they were found by Jonathan's sixteen-year-old cousin.


Leopold was buried in Jonathan's death mask.


Tomorrow morning or the day after, they will scrape it [candlewax] off with a kitchen knife and sweep it up with the leftover flowers strewn about, then there will be no more traces of a dead man in the house, the mourning house will smell no more of rotten flowers, burnt spruce twigs, and wax candles.

Marianne Fritz: The Weight of Things

“The man who makes light of what he's won is never able to defend it, and the man who doesn't know how to defend what he's won will lose far more than just his treasure!”


“This is the Distinguished Dr. Primarius Gottfried Trimm," Wilhelm whispered, looking imploringly, if not quite with outright horror, at his wife, who in general had little understanding of social hierarchies.

"Aha," Willhelmine said, adding: "He's a bit of a porker.”


“Was the longing still there and the burning silence?”


These were the words of this angel of angels, her baroque face beaming with those glorious feelings of triumph that sometimes fill people in the know when they have a chance to lord their secrets over their faintly hopeful, warily ignorant victims.

Thomas Bernhard: Woodcutters

“The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter—that has always been my ideal.”


You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life – a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.


Her mother, an unshapely, chubby-cheeked creature from the rural gentry of Styria, permanently lost her hair at the age of forty after being treated for influenza by her husband, and prematurely withdrew from society. She and her husband were able to live in the Gentzgasse thanks to her mother's fortune, which derived from the family estates in Styria and then devolved upon her. She provided for everything, since her husband earned nothing as a doctor. He was a socialite, what is known as a beau, who went to all the big Viennese balls during the carnival season and throughout his life was able to conceal his stupidity behind a pleasingly slim exterior. Throughout her life Auersberger's mother-in-law had a raw deal from her husband, but was content to accept her modest social station, not that of a member of the nobility, but one that was thoroughly petit bourgeois. Her son-in-law, as I suddenly recalled, sitting in the wing chair, made a point of hiding her wig from time to time--whenever the mood took him--both in the Gentzgasse and at the Maria Zaal in Styria, so that the poor woman was unable to leave the house. It used to amuse him, after he had hidden her wig, to drive his mother-in-law up the wall, as they say. Even when he was going on forty he used to hide her wigs--by that time she has provided herself with several--which was a symptom of his sickness and infantility. I often witnessed this game of hide-and-seek at Maria Zaal and in the Gentzgasse, and I honestly have to say that I was amused by it and did not feel in the least bit ashamed of myself. His mother-in-law would be forced to stay at home because her son-in-law had hidden her wigs, and this was especially likely to happen on public holidays. In the end he would throw the wig in her face. He needed his mother-in-law's humiliation, I reflected, sitting in the wing chair and observing him in the background of the music room, just as he needed the triumph that this diabolical behavior brought him.


We spend years sucking all we can out of someone, and then, having almost sucked them dry, we suddenly say that we ourselves are being sucked dry. And then for the rest of our lives we have to live with the knowledge of our own baseness.


And as I went on running I thought: I'll write something at once, no matter what -- I'll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse at once, now. Now, I thought -- at once, I told myself over and over again as I ran through the Inner City -- at once, I told myself, now -- at once, at once, before it's too late.


... as I sat in the wing chair...

Thomas Bernhard: Old Masters

Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt -- an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect -- to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hyprocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. These pictures are full of lies and falsehoods and full of hypocrisy and self-deception, there is nothing else in them if we disregard their often inspired artistry. All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man's absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. That is what all these pictures express, this helplessness which, on the one hand, embarasses the intellect and, on the other hand, bewilders the same intellect and moves it to tears, Reger said.


The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers. Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.

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."