Quotes from Patricia Duncker

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.

All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car's windscreen. but we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality.

You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.

We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them.

The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote. That's what my writing was. Messages in bottles.

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.

Sav svoj novac je trošila na kupovinu knjiga, a sve vrijeme na njihovo ?itanje. Sve su bile ispisane kritikama, odgovorima na marginama, ponekad su me?u njih bile umetnute ?itave stranice komentara. Šunjala se kroz stolje?a pisanja, ostavljaju?i svoj znak kud god bi išla.

Freedom: both so priceless and so expensive.

Ja pri?am pri?e. Mi svi izmišljamo pri?e. Pri?at ?u ti pri?e koje ?e te nasmijati. Volim da te gledam kako se smiješ. Nikad ne?u pobje?i iz ovog zatvora beskrajnih pri?a.

Suddenly, she employed those very English weapons: devious good manners and a rapid change of subject.

And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't.

Maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance.

Kao pobije?eni revolucionar napustila je svoje seksualne barikade. Nešto se u njoj slomilo, nježno, tiho i nevoljko, i zagnjurila je lice u udubljenje izme?u mog ramena i uha, ne opiru?i se. Bio sam veoma uznemiren njenom neobi?nom nježnoš?u i tiho sam joj pri?ao ni o ?emu naro?itom dok nije zaspala u mom naru?ju.

I stared at the changing patterns on the back of his white shirt as he moved under the trees.

But...if it's so awful and difficult who not try to become a group? Be accepted? He glittered at me for a moment, then said, I would rather be mad.

Ludilo i strast su se uvijek izmjenjivali. Kroz cijelu zapadnu književnu tradiciju. Ludilo je obilje egzistencije. Ludilo je na?in postavljanja teških pitanja.

Excess is essential to the production of austerity.

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.

Sophie von Hahn refused to be cowed, embarrassed, resentful, dishonest or passed over. [...] She intended to bewitch her straying childhood lover all over again, and free him from whatever noxious enchantment had induced him to be censorious and horrid. No fear, no guilt, no shame. She set out to win.

The Sibyl, sharp as an owl on the hunt, noticed his discomfiture at once. The mischievous smile, which she delivered at the last, finally revealed her monstrous teeth, and abruptly transformed her from the Grandmother into the Wolf.

This careful script, of which he had composed both speaking parts, floated away into the milky sky. For the Countess had been unexpectedly transformed into a malevolent harpy. He fiddled with the fingertips of his black gloves. Sophie grabbed his sleeve, utterly beside herself. The flood of love and trust poured out in the offending letter was clearly undergoing a rapid and dramatic revolution. Now she was screaming, both at Max and the absent Sibyl.