A Quote by Gunter Grass

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

Gunter Grass

Quote Topics

Auschwitz Even Explanations Never Surrounded

Quote Author

Gunter Grass
German - Novelist
October 16, 1927 - April 13, 2015

When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.

Imre Kertesz

We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.'

Gunter Grass

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

Archibald MacLeish

There are three kinds of explanation in science: explanations which throw a light upon, or give a hint at a matter; explanations which do not explain anything; and explanations which obscure everything.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.

Georges Braque

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

Gertrude Stein

There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

Carl Sandburg

All scientists should be skeptics. The reason why is that, even with the best of scientific measurements, we can come up with all kinds of explanations of what those measurements mean in terms of cause and effect, and yet most of those explanations are wrong. It's really easy to be wrong in science ... it's really hard to be right.

Roy Spencer

At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

Elie Wiesel

Children need explanations and they deserve explanations.

Todd Bridges

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

Dan Ariely

God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped, he would not be God.

Evagrius Ponticus

For myself, I never thought that I'd ever be able to even buy a house. Sometimes when you don't have it, and you're not surrounded my entrepreneurs, you don't think about it.