Zitate von Romain Gary
Romain Gary
Geburtstag: 21. Mai 1914
Todesdatum: 2. Dezember 1980
Andere Namen: Roman Kacew
Romain Gary war ein französischer Schriftsteller, Regisseur, Übersetzer und Diplomat. Im Zweiten Weltkrieg war er Pilot der Luftwaffe von France libre unter Charles de Gaulle. Gary schrieb überwiegend auf Französisch, auch wenn die englische Fassung seiner Werke mehrfach zuerst erschien.
Zitate Romain Gary
„Patriotismus ist Liebe zu den Seinen; Nationalismus ist Hass auf die anderen.“
zitiert nach Yves Bizeul, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte Nr. 01 vom 02.01.2007 Fn. 19 http://www.bpb.de/apuz/30737/nationalismus-patriotismus-und-loyalitaet-zur-offenen-republik?p=all#fr-footnodeid_19
Original franz.: "Le patriotisme, c'est l'amour des siens. Le nationalisme, c'est la haine des autres." - Éducation européenne. Roman, Paris 1945
„I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off.“
La Nuit Sera Calme [The Night Will Be Calm] (1974)
Kontext: Gari in Russian means "burn!"… I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off.
„As long as you live, you hope. You think that everything will just… get better.“
— Romain Gary, buch Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable
Quelle: Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable
„They thought I suffered from lack of exterior, when I suffered from excess of interior“
— Romain Gary, buch Gros-Câlin
Quelle: Gros-Câlin
„I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.“
The Life and Death of Émile Ajar (1980), an essay written prior to his suicide, as quoted in "Romain Gary: A Short Biography" by Madeleine Schwartz, at The Harvard Advocate http://www.theharvardadvocate.com/content/romain-gary-short-biography
Kontext: The gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar… I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.
„Men sometimes die much earlier than they are burried.“
— Romain Gary, buch Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable
Quelle: Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable
„Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.“
As quoted in The Harper Book of Quotations (1993) by Robert I. Fitzhenry, p. 223
„During the war he was an airman and slaughtered civilians from on high.“
— Romain Gary, buch Hocus Bogus
Pseudo (1976)
„I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.“
— Romain Gary, buch Promise at Dawn
Promise at Dawn (1960) as quoted in "Great Pretenders" by Emma Garman in Tablet (31 October 2007) http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/906/great-pretenders/
„When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated.“
— Romain Gary, buch Tulipe
Tulipe (1946)
„Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.“
Introduction to The Plague (1946) by Albert Camus, as translated in a 1962 edition.
„The bombs I dropped on Germany between 1940 and 1944 maybe killed a Rilke or a Goethe or a Hölderin in his cradle. And yes, of course, if it had to be done over, I would do it again. Hitler had condemned us to kill. Not even the most just causes are ever innocent.“
As quoted in Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2003) by Tzvetan Todorov, p. 217
„There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.“
Interview (1970), republished in Le Judaïsme n’est pas une Question de Sang [Judaism Isn’t About Blood] (2008) by Les éditions de l’Herne, as quoted in "A Chameleon on Show" in Forward (12 January 2011) http://www.forward.com/articles/134609/
