In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.
What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.
As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.
What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo.
No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.