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Famous Daša Drndić Quotes

“Andreas Ban would like to put several swifts on his chest to rest, to breathe with him like sleeping children. Little black birds like cheerful death. Painless. Little black birds with big eyes and a small beak, which peck noiselessly at his insides, see what is there and are silent. Andreas Ban stretches his arms toward the sky, imagining that he is flying, imagining himself in a flock of swifts and lets out a stifled cry. Small birds, they die when they are alone. He, Andreas Ban, is alone.”

DeathSadnessMortalityBirds
Book:Belladonna
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“What to do with the lives around us, within us? How to classify them? They are and are not examined lives, monochrome canvases with blots, smudges, freckles scattered over a space made up of shackled time. Examined lives (canvases), crisscrossed with shallow empty spaces, dappled with little bumps—hillocks—and narrow furrows, cuttings, grooves, many alike, in which slow, stagnant waters swirl. Lives with rounded edges, easily catalogued, easily connected, easily nailed onto the shelves of memory. And forgotten there. Then, those others: lives crisscrossed, entangled, knotted wit veins, scars, clefts which continue to breathe under the gravestones over the little mounds of our being, scabbed-over wounds that still bleed within. Impenetrable lives. They flicker in the darkness, sending out little sparks of light, fluorescent, like the bones of corpses. Placed side by side, there is no current between them, because both these kinds of life collapse into themselves, silently and menacingly like rising waters. Kaleidoscopic lives. Like the drawings of schizoid patients.”

PeopleWarLossHistoryTraumaLivesVictims
Book:EEG
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“...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.”

SocietyIndependenceAuthenticityFree ThoughtIntellectuals
Book:Belladonna
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“In other words, melancholy would be a pathological form of mourning, a sick flight from reality, a flight from the outside world into a refuge, into the inner world of the psyche. What if reality is sick, what then? What if the inner world is destroyed, in ruins and robbed, where to then? So, in grief, the world becomes poor and empty, while in melancholy the ego is like some kind of abandoned archaeological discovery that has been dug up. Yes, the melancholic is a radical atheist who in his hollow discourse worships a dead god.”

PainGriefPsychologyDepressionMourningMelancholyTraumama
Book:Belladonna
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“Subtle distinctions of pronunciation in our language are being lost and words are becoming slimy, spoken often with an idiotic smile as speakers fashionably soften nonexistent consonants. Degenerate. Like children, half-articulate, vacuous, infantile orators roll words around their mouths like hot potatoes, as though they were toothless, they shift them about, squash them, then open their mouths to eject a mash, a sticky pre-masticated porridge, which slides down their chins.”

CultureLanguageDegradationPronunciationCultural Loss
Book:EEG
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“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.”

PhilosophyNarrow MindednessProvincialismRestrictions
Book:Belladonna
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