Kneadalski shrank, crouched, and hit him from below with a shattering, copycat counterface as follows: he too rolled his eyeballs, lifted them and ogled, he too opened his mouth in calflike rapture, and, his face thus prepared, he moved it in circles till a fly fell into his gaping mouth; he then ate it.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.

— Witold Gombrowicz

I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Reading

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.

— Witold Gombrowicz

I am a collection of the family’s body parts.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Man does not fear death, only the suffering.

— Witold Gombrowicz

There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself – the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered.

— Witold Gombrowicz

It is in the prime of youth that man sinks into empty phrases and grimaces. It’s in this smithy that our maturity is forged.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Our element is unending immaturity.

— Witold Gombrowicz

You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!

— Witold Gombrowicz

Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

— Witold Gombrowicz

A brilliant liar; he has total recall.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.

— Witold Gombrowicz

I could have protested of course, who says I couldn’t – I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and – no matter how difficult it would have been – made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have – yet I couldn’t because I didn’t want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy!

— Witold Gombrowicz

There is nothing that the mature hate more, there is nothing that disgusts them more, than immaturity.

— Witold Gombrowicz

A hanged sparrow! Who would ever think of hanging a sparrow? It’s like flavoring borscht with two mushrooms instead of just one – it’s too much!

— Witold Gombrowicz

Kneadalski shrank, crouched, and hit him from below with a shattering, copycat counterface as follows: he too rolled his eyeballs, lifted them and ogled, he too opened his mouth in calflike rapture, and, his face thus prepared, he moved it in circles till a fly fell into his gaping mouth; he then ate it.

— Witold Gombrowicz

Two conspirators with a frog, following the line of a whiffletree.

— Witold Gombrowicz

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