Gunter Grass Quotes

My father had been a Wehrmacht officer in the second world war and was a violent and damaged man.

Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

If I had known it I would have told my son, I'd rather shoot you than let you join the SS. But I didn't know.

Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years.

My father wanted to be a hero. He went to the Air Force Academy, was valedictorian, and then he found himself strafing villagers in Vietnam in a war he didn't want to be in and didn't understand. He was extremely conflicted about the line where he went from being the good guy to possibly being the bad guy.

I'm still suffering from shock from the last war. I was almost drafted! Luckily I was wounded while taking the physical. When I reached the psychiatrist, I said, Give me a gun, I'll wipe out the whole German Army in five minutes. He said, You're crazy! I said, Write it down!

There's genuine pain in Eric's eyes. And I feel a stab of guilt. But you can't stay with people because of guilt.

I no longer knew whether it was raindrops or my own tears that were flowing down my cheeks, and I hated to have to drag along this relic of a sniveling child.

Sometimes I feel very guilty, so I don't know if I am a clear example of a perfect father, because sometimes I also just punish myself, saying I'm not doing probably the right thing at this particular moment. It's a secret.

The sin and the shame and the sorrow, The crime and the want and the woe That are born there in your workshop, No hand can paint, you know.

Repentance is a one-faced Janus, ever looking to the past.

Self-pity - it's the only pity that counts.

I can still see her face -- The sorrow in her eyes, her voice, as she condemns me. I didn't know it was possible to feel such shame. To feel so sick at heart. I'm lost inside, my soul -- all that I thought I was, and am, and ever will be -- shattered, cast to the winds. Compared to this, death is a mercy.

Out, damned spot! Out, I say!

I felt suddenly cruel, like I´d told dmall children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their Mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed.

Don’t you just hate nights like that, when you think over every mistake you’ve made, every hurt you’ve received, every bit of meanness you’ve dealt out? There’s no profit in it, no point to it, and you need sleep.

Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

I must have decided wrongly, because I am not at peace.

He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.

I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself.

[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.

You can run away from home But you can't run away from your pain I sit here alone There's always someone else to blame.

I punish myself for my whole life, my whole life I punish.

You told me you had destroyed it." "I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.