Parsifal Quotes

“I work to Glenn Gould in the morning and go to sleep listening to Parsifal.”

“Parsifal is on his way to the temple of the Grail Knights and says: “I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come”, and the all-knowing Gurnemanz replies: “You see, my son, time turns here into space”

“Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.”

“…This singular reversal may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the “subject” (since Christianity) is the one who suffers: where there is a wound, there is a subject: die Wunde! die Wunde! says Parsifal, thereby becoming “himself”; and the deeper the wound, at the body’s center (at the “heart”), the more the subject becomes a subject: for the subject is intimacy (“The wound…is of a frightful intimacy”). Such is love’s wound: a radical chasm (at the “roots” of being), which cannot be closed, and out of which the subject drains, constituting himself as a subject in this very draining.”―from_A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments_. Translated by Richard Howard, p. 189”

“Why, he was so handsome and brave that no one would ever have suspected that he was bookish!”