Belladonna
Daša Drndić
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Memories die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they burst, lose color, lose suppleness, stiffen like corpses. All that remains are shells with translucent edges. Half-erased brain platelets are a slippery terrain, deceptive. One’s mental archive is locked, it languishes in the dark. The past is riddled with holes, souvenirs can’t help here. Everything must be thrown away. Everything. And perhaps everyone as well.”
“...the intellectual is a person who nurtures, preserves and propagates independent judgment, a person loyal exclusively to truth, a courageous and wrathful individual for whom no force of this world is too great or too frightening not to be subjected to scrutiny and called to account. ... A true intellectual, a genuine one, is always an outsider, …he is a person who lives in self-imposed exile on the margins of society.”
“The provincial spirit does not like the unfamiliar. That is one of its fundamental attributes, defining its history, its culture, its mental world. Provincial life is a life of routine. The provincial spirit is a tribal spirit with no awareness of the individual.”
“The philosophy of the province is a philosophy of a closed circle that does not allow an apostasy, without which there is no creativity. The philosophy of the province is a normative and normalizing, suprapersonal and impersonal philosophy, it shuts out all aspects of life, education, sport, nutrition, nature, love, work, language, religion and death (which is far from being the death of an individual) replacing life with rigid forms of the normative which apply to all.”
“Individual destinies sink, small lives merge into one great false mass event that keeps repeating its statistical story.”
“..it is a deaf age of defiled silence through which pigs grunt as they stampede over the paving stones of memory.”
“...wars are orgies of forgetfulness. The twentieth century has archived vast catacombs, tunnels of information in which researchers get lost and in the end abandon their research, catacombs that ever fewer people enter. Stored away---forgotten. The twentieth century, a century of great tidying that ends in cleansing; the twentieth century, a century of cleansing, a century of erasure. Language perhaps remains, but it too is crumbling.”
“...it is precisely about things which it is impossible to speak of that one must speak…”
“…he sees a play by Arthur Kopit, he doesn’t remember the title, something about the way a lie becomes the truth and the truth a lie.”
“the intellectual is a person who nurtures, preserves and propagates independent judgment, a person loyal exclusively to truth, a courageous and wrathful individual for whom no force of this world is too great or too frightening not to be subjected to scrutiny and called to account”
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Book Keywords:
society, destiny, bear-witness, intellectuals, memory, the-present, the-past, trauma, war, independence, statistics, fate, free-thought, restrictions, philosophy, cycles, narrow-mindedness, authenticity, history, lies, 21st-century, speak-up, cleansing, defend, language, truth, archives, vocalize, provincialism
