Quotes from Elias Canetti

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?

I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.

It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.

Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open arms into their misfortune?

Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages

One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind

You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.

The hand which scoops up the water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket. [p. 217]

I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no violoncello like him, no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued, in an inexpressibly tender language. I have only these lines on the yellowish paper and words that are never new, for they keep saying the same thing through an entire life.

One lives in the naive notion that "later" there will be more room than in the entire past.

Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?

Yap?yorlar, ama ne yapt?klar?n?n bilincinde deÄŸiller, birtak?m al??kanl?klar edinmiÅŸler, ama bunun nedenini bilmiyorlar; ömürleri boyunca dola??p durduklar? halde yollar?n? bulam?yorlar: kitleden ayr?lamayan, koyun gibi onun peÅŸinden gidenler için doÄŸald?r bunlar?n tümü. Sy123

His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have been able to say what precisely he had in his mouth. He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digestion happen of themselves.

A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.