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Vienna Quotes

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Vienna Quotes

“You'll come with me to Vienna, of course," I said. It wasn't a question. Käthe blinked, surprised by my sudden turn in conversation. "What?" "You'll be coming with me to Vienna," I repeated. "Won't you?" "Liesl," she said, eyes shining with tears. "Are you sure?" "Of course I'm sure," I said. "It'll be just like the Ideal Imaginary." She laughed again, and the sound was as pure as a spring morning. The what-if games my little sister and I had played as girls had been ways to pass the time, a space we created untouched by the grime and grief of ordinary drudgery. A world where we were princesses and queens, a world as beautiful and as magical as any my brother and I had made together. "Just imagine, Käthe." I took her hand mine. "Bonbons and handsome swains waiting on us hand and foot." She giggled. "And all the silks and velvets and brocades to dress ourselves in!" "An invitation to a different ball every night!" "Masques and operas and parties and dancing!" "Schnitzel and Apfelstrudel and Turkish coffee!" "Don't forget the chocolate torte," Käthe added. "It's your favorite." I laughed, and for a moment, I allowed myself to pretend we were little girls again, when our wants and dreams were as closely entwined as our fingers. "What if," I said softly. "Not a what-if," my sister said fiercely. "A when." "When," I repeated. I could not stop smiling.”

ImaginationViennaElisabeth VoglerKäthe Vogler
Book:Shadowsong
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“Vienna is certainly the grandest city I have ever seen. All along the Ringstrasse colossal buildings proclaim an imperial past – the parliament, the Palace of Justice, the Natural History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the opera house, the Burgtheater and above all the Hofburg, with its 2,600 rooms. They all look much the same – mighty piles of granite and sandstone with warlike statuary crowded along the roofs and pediments. A Martian coming to earth would unhesitatingly land at Vienna, thinking it the capital of the planet.”

TravelViennaAustria
Book:Neither here nor there: travels in Europe
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“For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths.”

Fascism20th CenturyVienna
Book:The World of Yesterday
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“The creator of Bambi was secretly writing pornographic novels on the side. This single fact tells you everything you need to know about turn-of-the-century Vienna, and why it was the perfect place for Sigmund Freud and his far-fetched theories about the human psyche.”

IdeasPornographyViennaFreudHuman PsycheTheoriesBambi
Book:The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
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“Aquella noche fue por primera vez a la ópera; con gran sorpresa descubrió que cantaban en italiano y, como no entendía una sola palabra, supuso que toda la representación era una especie de servicio religioso. Deambuló a altas horas de la noche hasta los iluminados chapiteles de San Esteban; la torre sur de la catedral, leyó en una placa, se había iniciado a mediados del siglo XIV y concluido en 1439. Viena, pensó Garp, era un cadáver; posiblemente toda Europa era un cadáver ataviado en un ataúd abierto.”

EuropeOperaViennaCathedral
Book:The world according to Garp
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“Vienna was the city of statues. They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets. They stood on the tip of the highest towers, lay down on stone tombs, sat on horseback, kneeled, prayed, fought animals and wars, danced, drank wine and read books made of stone. They adorned cornices like the figureheads of ships. They stood in the heart of fountains glistening with water as if they had just been born. They sat under trees in the parks summer and winter. Some wore costumes of other periods, and some had no clothes at all. Men, women, children, kings, dwarfs, gargoyles, unicorns, lions, clowns, heroes, wise men, prophets, angels, saints and soldiers preserved for Vienna an illusion of eternity.”

EternityStatuesVienna
Author:Anaïs Nin
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“As the nineteenth century progressed, Austria-Hungary took refuge in reaction at home and adventurism abroad in an effort to contain the centrifugal forces which eventually blew it, and much of Europe, apart. Austria, and Vienna in particular, was the real home of Central-European anti-semitism. Jews wew bottom of the pile. No matter how low you sank, the Jews were still below you, along with the gypsies. At the tail-end of the nineteenth century, the Viennese politician Karl Lueger founded his power base on an anti-semitic platform. Stories of ritual murder by Jewish cabals featured regularly in the Viennese gutter press. It is no accident that Schickelgruber, the faied artist who became Hitler, should have neen the son of a petty official and have spent his ambitions at the butt end of Viennese snobbery.”

ViennaAntisemitismAdolf HitlerAustria Hungary
Book:Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe
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“This evening : Fischl and Mayreder debated on Secession, Fischl pro and Mayreder contra - primarily against Olbrich. It's all very well to dismiss him, to criticize - but just try doing better yourself dear Mayreder ! It was the fourth time that M. had called on us in the last few days, and we're heartily glad to be rid of him. Nobody misses him, myself least of all. - I wonder if he's still fond of me? He's very taken with the Secessionist painters, being particularly 'enamoured' - as he puts it - of Bacher, Engelhart and Klimt. Of the latter he says he can well understand young ladies falling for him "in a big way". Oh yes, that was fun : while Kuehl, Klimt, Mayreder, Jettel etc. were here, Klimt gave me the idea of shaping my bread into a heart. I did so, then he formed a toothpick into an arrow and plunged it into the heart. He took red wine and made it flow from the would. It looked really good. He gave it to Mayreder as 'my wounded heart'. On reflection, I can see that it was a very brutal joke and I regret it, for at the time Mayreder gave me a look that went straight through me. Incidentally, Klimt knows that M. is fond of me. He noticed - and said as much as well. I didn't deny it.”

ViennaDiaryKlimt
Book:Diaries 1898-1902
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“It's strange. When I put something incomprehensible into a picture, it's usually because the form and colour interest me and because it just happens to fit in. Thwn my friends come along : 'What is that suppose to mean _' And they rack their brains for an interpretation, finding so many ingenious explanations that I feel quite proud of all the unarticulated ideas concealed in my pictures." - Fernand Khnopff to Alma Mahler, while walking in the Prater in Vienna, from her diary July 1899”

ViennaDiaryAlma MahlerFernand Khnopff
Author:Fernand Khnopff
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“For as I looked down to see what sort of people were about, I caught sight of a strange couple. A man of rather advanced years, judging by his back which was turned towards me, dressed in a thin, yellow swanskin jacket, pale blue trousers, heavy shoes and a little round hat, as he walked down the street. He was leading a girl, dressed no less oddly than himself in a brown cope which was draped about her shoulders almost like a toga. But the girl had so large a head, enough to startle anyone, that it kept causing people to stare at it. Both of them went their way at a moderate pace; but both were so clumsy and awkward that it was immediately evident they were not used to Vienna and that they were incapable of behaving like other folk.”

ViennaStrange CoupleTourmaline
Book:Tales of Old Vienna and Other Prose
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“Nietzsche asked in 1882: 'What is the point of all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals?' The brief moment of intoxication lures us off the via dolorosa. Such spectacles also asserted the underlying continuity of European society since the Renaissance, despite steam engine, trainm and telegraph. Such was the confidence in the homology between the present day and a supposedly integrated and self-assured sixteenth century that people were still willing, in donning costumes, to turn themselves into living works of art. (This was the bourgeois response to the fantasy of the socialist Fourier, who thought people could become living artworks if they disrobed.) The contrast between the costumes and the black-and-white everyday garb of 1879, a way of dressing as if designed to be photographed, was sharp. Fourteen thousand citizens took part in Makart's extravaganza, 300,000 more looked on.”

ArtCostumesNietzscheViennaFestivalFourierMakartRingstrasse
Book:A History of Art History
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“One of my father’s purposes in going to Vienna was to see a journalist by the name of Karl Kraus. I do not know what they discussed, though they probably concerned themselves with Jewish matters and quite possibly with the problem of the translation into literary German of the Yiddish poems of Moritz Rosenfeld, the New York garment worker-poet, whom father had ‘‘discovered.’’ I remember being taken into Kraus’s apartment in an old-fashioned Vienna apartment house, and there I remember what seemed to me a confusion and disorder which I have never seen equaled elsewhere.”

ViennaYiddish LiteratureKarl Kraus
Book:Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth
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“In America, even your menus have the gift of language.... The Chef's own Vienna Roast. A hearty, rich meat loaf, gently seasoned to perfection and served in a creamy nest of mashed farm potatoes and strictly fresh garden vegetables. Of course, what you get is cole slaw and a slab of meat, but that doesn't matter because the menu has already started your juices going. Oh, those menus. In America, they are poetry.”

MatterAmericaCoursesLanguageRichFoodGardenPerfectionCookingMeatCulinaryFarmsVegetablesChefPotatoesJuiceNestsMenusViennaHeartySlabs
Author:Laurie Lee
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“You know, it's very clear, as one looks back on history again of the Cold War that, following the crisis in Cuba, following the Khrushchev - beating down of Jack Kennedy in Vienna, that President Kennedy believed that we had to join the battle for the Third World, and the next crisis that developed in that regards was Vietnam.”

KnowsWorldLooksWarNextPresidentClearColdBattleThirdsRegardCrisisFollowingVietnamCold WarCubaThird WorldViennaPresident KennedyJack Kennedy
Author:Alexander Haig
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“Genitive is a funny word because it means "from," but it also is the gender in European languages for objects: the masculine, feminine, and neuter. So if you have a genitive present, there's room for everybody to fit in. I just did a project in Vienna about rock, paper, scissor; you change the gender and it simply changes the whole thing. Rock is no longer a male. It doesn't function the same way.”

IfsWayMeanWholeLanguageRoomsRocksObjectsFitPaperProjectsFunctionMalesGenderFeminineMasculineVienna
Author:Lawrence Weiner
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