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I shall speak of … how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another … Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

— Günter Grass

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Sadness

More quotes by Günter Grass

Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred.

Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.

The Boys' Crusade (2003)

We of the long tails! We of the presentient whiskers! We of the perpetually growing teeth! We, the serried footnotes to man, his proliferating commentary. We, indestructible!

The Rat (1986)

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Life could not be lived wet, whether it be in rain or tears.

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In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

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In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.

Abraham Lincoln

Every joy that some experience is paid for by the sorrow of others.

Kaneko Fumiko The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman (1991)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Günter Grass (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.