Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire t destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure.

Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits between the gifted and the ungifted.

Rainer [protagonist in the novel], who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplated san evening he says that evening is melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to and end.

if someone has a fate, then it's a man, if someone gets a fate, then it's a woman.

Stifter tells us that people are not free, that they are slaves to the laws of Nature. So you have to commit violent deeds (if you don’t have anyone to do other kinds of deeds with), actions that ordinary people would call crimes but which we define as the norm, though of course it is our norm and no that of the rest.

Intellectuals will still go on emphasizing free will even when they’ve got nothing left to eat.

I have a feeling that you despise your body and that you only value art, you only value your argent needs, but eating and sleeping aren’t enough. You believe that your appearance is your enemy, and the only friend you have is music. Why look just in the mirror, look at your reflection, you’ll never find a better friend that yourself.

The criteria of art are the imponderable, the immeasurable.

Time stands still for man and woman alike, it is a good moment, because Time usually makes everything worse, poor people grow old, rich people can buy a little time but they can'hold it up for good, it always catches up with them. In the last analysis, Time is democratic.

In the old days people had no time to harm the environment because they were busy doing harm to themselves, in the War, for instance.

Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back.

Nothing is natural, yet everything is as it is by nature.

Forewarned is forearmed.

sewing in itself is already in the women's blood.

In this new era, what sets you free is knowledge, not work.