Oskar Quotes

Cher Marcel,
Allô. I am Oskar's mom. I have thought about it a ton, and I have decided that it isn't obvious why Oskar should go to French lessons, so he will no longer be going to go see you on Sundays like he used to. I want to thank you very much for everything you have taught Oskar, particularly the conditional tense, which is weird. Obviously, there's no need to call me when Oskar doesn't come to his lessons, because I already know, because this was my decision. Also, I will keep sending you checks, because you are a nice guy.
Votre ami dévouée,
Mademoiselle Schell. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls - it wouldn't matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone's loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation zloty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls. ~ Thomas Keneally

Open your eyes at last and see ... now I will open the book of the world for you,there are no words in it,just pictures ~ Oskar Kokoschka

Tonight Oskar and his daughter are going to sleep in an abandoned wooden boat on the beach. He will try to make this seem normal. Every day he has to try to make what happens to them appear nothing out of the ordinary. As if he still has all the magician's tricks of a father. As if he still has the power to keep her from harm. ~ Glenn Haybittle

...the facts of economic life cannot be comprehensively described in terms of statistics. ~ Oskar Morgenstern

If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband's power in Brno, had idly - during a party, say; a musical recital at the castle - gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Führer's. An armed Marxist Jew. ~ Thomas Keneally

Now, in the modern money economy everything in the nature of a social-economic occurrence consists in human actions and behaviour. ~ Oskar Morgenstern

Is it safe out here?" I whisper.
"Mmm?"
"The animals? Bears? Wolves?"
Oskar laughs. "Well, I've already claimed you, so the other predators are out of luck. ~ Sarah Fine

Oskar pushes away the blanket. Lies looking down at his naked body. His naked body that will give the lie to any false identity papers he manages to procure. Has anyone, he wonders, ever explained to me the significance of circumcision? Why I have had to sacrifice to God a piece of my sexual organ. ~ Glenn Haybittle

The god of unreflecting drunkenness advised me to take no reading matter at all, or if I absolutely insisted on reading matter, then a little stack of Rasputin would do; Apollo, on the other hand, in his shrewd, sensible way, tried to talk me out of this trip to France altogether, but when he saw that Oskar's mind was made up, insisted on proper baggage; very well, I would have to take the highly respectable yawn that Goethe had yawned so long ago, but for spite, and also because I knew that The Elective Affinities would never solve all my sexual problems, I also took Rasputin and his naked women, naked but for their black stockings. If Apollo strove for harmony and Dionysus for drunkenness and chaos, Oskar was a little demigod whose business it was to harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason. In addition to his mortality, he had one advantage over all the full divinities whose characters and careers had been established in the remote past: Oskar could read what he pleased whereas the gods censored themselves. ~ Gunter Grass

The awareness of imagery is part of living ... a life which derives its power from within itself will focus on the perception ... of images. ~ Oskar Kokoschka

I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. ~ Oskar Kokoschka

The life of the consciousness is boundless. It interpenetrates the world and is woven in all its imagery. Therefore, we must listen closely to our inner voice. ~ Oskar Kokoschka

Love is the best medicine. ~ Oskar Homolka

Oskar: I'm God!
Thomas: You're an atheist.
Oskar: I don't exist! ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Closed his mouth. Then pressed a kiss on Oskar's lips. For a few seconds Oskar saw through Eli's eyes. And what he saw was ... himself. Only much better, more handsome, stronger than what he thought of himself. Seen with love. ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

But even if, as Johnson argues, power and dominance serve no meaningful purpose, they always incur costs. In biology, the cost can be painfully visible. During courtship, the argus cock pheasant spreads his large secondary wing feathers, which are decorated with beautiful eye spots; the bigger they are, the more they stimulate the female. And the longer the feathers, the more progeny the cock will produce. So the more beautiful cocks produce more descendants. That should be a competitive advantage. But the evolution of the argus pheasant has run itself into a blind alley because the most gorgeous cock has feathers so huge and unwieldy that they may cause him to be eaten by a predator, because he can't fly away fast enough. Oskar Heinroth, the teacher of Konrad Lorenz, commented: 'Next to the wings of the argus pheasant, the hectic life of western civilized man is the most stupid product of intra-specific selection! ~ Margaret Heffernan

The Schindler Jews were off-limits in Brunnlitz. ~ Oskar Schindler

I've read every letter that you've sent me these past two years. In return, I've sent you many form letters, with the hope of one day being able to give you the proper response you deserve. But the more letters you wrote to me, and the more of yourself you gave, the more daunting my task became.
I'm sitting beneath a pear tree as I dictate this to you, overlooking the orchards of a friend's estate. I've spent the past few days here, recovering from some medical treatment that has left me physically and emotionally depleted. As I moped about this morning, feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me, like a simple solution to an impossible problem: today is the day I've been waiting for.
You asked me in your first letter if you could be my protege. I don't know about that, but I would be happy to have you join me in Cambridge for a few days. I could introduce you to my colleagues, treat you to the best curry outside India, and show you just how boring the life of an astrophysicist can be.
You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar.
I would be happy to do anything possible to facilitate such a path. It's wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination toward scientific ends.
But Oskar, intelligent people write to me all the time. In your fifth letter you asked, "What if I never stop inventing?" That question has stuck with me.
I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, bec ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system. ~ Oskar Schindler

If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the head, why bother reading it in the first place? ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904 ~ Franz Kafka

True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world. ~ Oskar Kokoschka

I had to help them. There was no choice. ~ Oskar Schindler

Behind all sorrows in the world Klepp saw a ravenous hunger; all human suffering, he believed, could be cured with a portion of blood sausage. What quantities of fresh blood sausage with rings of onion, washed down with beer, Oskar consumed in order to make his friend think his sorrow's name was hunger and not Sister Dorothy. ~ Gunter Grass

Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum! ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more. ~ Oskar Schindler

Notes from his conversations with the boys who had been at the pool last night. Their accounts basically matched up, and one word had turned up frequently: angel. Oskar Eriksson had been rescued by an angel. ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I am the conscience of all those who knew something - but did nothing. ~ Oskar Schindler

Maybe home isn't a place. Maybe it's a feeling you have inside of you, being around the people who matter to you ~ Justin Somper

As a Jewish kid during those times, I fought to live every day. I didn't have a choice. As an influential Nazi, Schindler did have a choice. Countless times he could have abandoned us, taken his fortune, and fled. He could have decided that his life depended on working us to death but he didn't. Instead, he put his own life in danger every time he protected us for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. I am not a philosopher, but I believe that Oskar Schindler defines heroism. He proves that one person can stand up to evil and make a difference. I am living proof of that. I recall a television interview I once saw with scholar and writer Joseph Campbell. I've never forgotten his definition of a hero. Campbell said that a hero is an ordinary human being who does "the best of things in the worst of times". Oskar Schindler personifies that definition. ~ Leon Leyson

I knew the people who worked for me. When you know people, you have to behave towards them like human beings. ~ Oskar Schindler

We must differentiate between guilt and duty. The soldier on the front, like the common man, who does his duty everywhere, should not be held responsible for the actions of a few who also called themselves Germans. ~ Oskar Schindler

I went up to his gravestone and repeated what the others had done: I placed a pebble on his tomb and silently said to him:

'Well, Oskar, at last we meet again, but this is not the time for reproaches and complaints. It would not be fair to you or to me. Now you are in another world, in eternity, and I can no longer ask you all those questions to which in life you would have given evasive replies... and death is the best evasion of all. I have received no answer, my dear, I do not know why you abandoned me... But what not even your death or my old age can change is that we are still married, this is how we are before God. I have forgiven you everything, everything...'

Murmuring these words, I let them push my wheelchair up the slight incline leading to the gravestone that marks the place where his remains are laid to rest, outside the Jewish cemetery of Jerusalem. I knew that somehow the power of my thoughts had reached him, and felt, after all those years, a strange inner peace filling my spirit. ~ Emilie Schindler

Consciousness is the grave of things, the place where they cease to exist, beyond which they end. And when they have ended, it seems that they no longer have any essential existence except in the visions in me. ~ Oskar Kokoschka

Our knowledge of dynamic processes is necessarily inferior to our ability to describe stationary conditions. ~ Oskar Morgenstern

...I believe that nothing that once was can be completely undone. Even if destroyed in the material world and forgotten by men, it remains and will remain alive in the memory of an infinite being for which the past as well as the future is always present, and that is thus the greatest, the only true historian, and the keeper of the eternal tradition of which even our best human traditions ...are but shadows and images. ~ Paul Oskar Kristeller

One day I wandered away from her and hid. I liked the way it felt to have someone look for me, to hear my name again and again. "Oskar! Oskar!" Maybe I didn't even like it, but I needed it right then. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

To really enjoy the better things in life, one must first have experienced the things they are better than. ~ Oskar Homolka

Everything in the world has a spirit which is released by its sound. ~ Oskar Fischinger

Power is when you have every justification to kill someone, and then you don't. ~ Oskar Schindler

I thank my personal staff for their restless sacrifice for my work. ~ Oskar Schindler

Eli snorted, her eyes narrowed.
- Because I am like you.
- What do you mean like me? I..
Eli thrust her hand through the air as if she was holding a knife, said:
- What are you looking at, idiot? Want to die, or something? - Stabbed the air with empty hand. - That what happens if you look at me.
Oskar rubbed his lips together, dampening them.
- What are you saying?
- It's not me that's saying it. It's you. That was the first thing I heard you say. Down on the playground.
Oskar remembered. The tree. The knife. How he had held up the blade of the knife like a mirror, seen Eli for the first time. ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

Consciousness is a sea ringed with visions. ~ Oskar Kokoschka

His wife, Emilie, still lived, without any financial help from him, in her little house in San Vicente, south of Buenos Aires. She lives there at the time of the writing of this book. As she was in Brinnlitz, she is a figure of quiet dignity. In a documentary made by German television in 1973, she spoke - without any of the abandoned wife's bitterness or sense of grievance - about Oskar and Brinnlitz, about her own behavior in Brinnlitz. Perceptively, she remarked that Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents. ~ Thomas Keneally

It was the first time Oskar had seen this juxtaposition of humans and cattle cars, and it was a greater shock than hearing of it. ~ Thomas Keneally

I consider myself responsible to the coming generations, which are left stranded in a blitzed world, unaware of the soul trembling in awe before the mystery of life. ~ Oskar Kokoschka

He who saves a single soul , saves the world entire ~ Oskar Schindler