Josef Winkler > Quotes

“A girl, hardly ten, holding a Barbie doll by its hair, bent over the edge of the fountain, sprinkled her face and forearms, and stared to the side for a moment as Piccoletto, who was also seated on the edge of the fountain, his legs outspread, chewing at his silver crucifix, pulled off his socks. The girl stared long into his leg holes at his balls hanging from his baggy yellow underwear and at the creased foreskin draped over the head of his large member.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“Und wenn ich morgens auf meinem aus dem georgischen Dorf Besch-taschen stammenden Gebetsteppich knie, lasse ich den zahnlosen Bischof wieder aufleben, der ein enthäutetes, noch blutendes, aber ausgeweidetes Lamm mit einer Auferstehungsfahne dreimal im Zeichen des Kreuzes in die Höhe hebt und schreit: Hitler von Nazareth, König der Juden! denn ich habe so einen Haß auf die Katholische Kirche, daß ich am liebsten mit einer Kirchturmspitze aufs Herzjesu zulaufen möchte.”
― Josef Winkler, Leichnam, seine Familie belauernd.

“Wenn mich im Kärntner Drautal nicht so viele Menschen verachten und hassen würden, hätte ich mich schon längst den Garaus gemacht, aber denen den Gefallen tun? Nur über meine Leiche! Nein, nein, es bleibt dabei, die Lebenden sollen doch nicht von den Toten auferstehn, denn bei den Toten bin ich gerne, sie tun mir nichts und sind auch Menschen.”
― Josef Winkler, Leichnam, seine Familie belauernd.

“In the clay vessel where the putrid-smelling bone stock was rendered from the bones of slaughtered animals, to be painted on the horses with a black crow's feather around the eyes & nostrils and on the belly, to protect them from the mosquitoes and horseflies...”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“   "Signori, buon giorno! Un chilo di salmone originale, soltanto dieci mila lire," called Piccoletto, and chewed at his fingernails, smelling of fish slime and fish blood & blackened with squid ink at the edges.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“After Jonathan, wearing only his pajamas, jumped out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night & met with Leopold, who awaited him in the garden, the two went to the stable and put a three-meter-long hemp rope in a bricklayer's bag splattered with quicklime. On a September night, under the light of the moon, they walked with the rope up the village street, passing the calvary, not noticing the devil's red wings, which were stretched to the point of tearing—Lucifer was sweating blood—and then up the hill of the parish house into the barn. In the empty barn full of dusty cobwebs—the parish house was unoccupied at the time—they climbed a wooden ladder to the crossbeam. The two boys tied the two ends of rope behind their ears and jumped into the emptiness, weeping and embracing, a few meters from the armless Christ who had once been rescued from a stream bed by the priest and painter of prayer cards and who now stood in the entranceway of the parish house, gasping and smelling the blood sweated out by the devil in the calvary. With their tongues out, their sexes stiff, their semen-flecked pants dripping urine, Jonathan in pajamas and Leopold in his quicklime-splattered bricklayer's clothes, they hung in the barn of the parish house until they were found by Jonathan's sixteen-year-old cousin, who shined the beam of his flashlight across their four dangling legs twenty-four hours later, and were cut down with a butcher's knife by Adam the Third.”
― josef winkler, When the Time Comes

“The corpse fluid had dripped onto the brown Carinthian suit of one of the pallbearers, & he vomited beside a funeral wreath propped up against a garden fence. On its black ribbon, in golden letters, was written A Last Goodbye.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“A little humpbacked man with a waxen face, his cadaverous skin covered in black blotches, crossed himself and kissed the black fingertips of his emaciated hand, while a group of nodding bishops dressed in red, wiping the sweat from their chins with kerchiefs embroidered with yellow mitres, walked past him through Saint Peter's Square. His eyelids and eyelashes were painted black with mascara, his eyes were yellowish and blood-spotted, his sparse hair was dyed black, his moustache flecked with gray. Wheezing, he pulled his mouth open and closed and grasped his throat with a hand covered in golden rings.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“A gypsy girl peeled a fresh green fig with her long and filthy red-lacquered fingernails.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“A twisted countenance overcame her in death. Her cheeks and mouth were deeply sunken. Liver mortis dotted her face and hands. Moreover, the process of decomposition was so advanced, it was impossible to expect that the funeral guests remain seated, praying their rosary before her open coffin.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“And in those days, if a writer had not shattered himself against his own sentences and died while doing so, I could not believe a word of what he wrote. If I did not sense, when reading, that language lay in the balance, suspended, sentence by sentence, between life and death, then the book held no interest for me.”
― Josef Winkler

“The wet skeletons of two young hedgehogs still lay on the floor of Hell.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“In the black eye sockets of the dead, and over the thousands of molehills spread throughout the plains, the snow fell noiselessly. Only the bandy-legged wolf, wandering over my footprints among the crosses on the graves, did not leap over the cemetery walls, on this long night.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“While Jonathan lay on his deathbed in his parents' house, his bluish red rope burns and strangulation bruises covered with a fresh garland of carnations, purple and aromatic, from the garden, and his corpse had turned wax-yellow and his fingernails blue, his mother, in a black dress, kept vigil through the night, near the two candles that lit up his face to the left and right of the sofa, never once closing her eyes.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“Before the presents, Maximilian and his brother Reinhard would bathe together in the smoke kitchen in a wood tub held together by iron rings. Cursing when one of them had peed in the bathwater, they would lather themselves with a bar of turpentine soap with a stag stamped on its surface, dry their lean white bodies, the genitals still hairless, with a coarse towel beside the glowing red griddle of the wood-burning stove, and put on clean underwear, ironed shirts, and gray wool socks.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“A black-veiled nun, holding plastic bags full of cucumbers, apricots, and onions in one hand and pressing two tall blonde Barbie dolls wrapped in plastic to her breast with the other, stopped before the tomato vendor, whose vegetable knife hung from a lanyard around his neck, laid the dolls on a wooden crate, and asked for a few kilos of tomatoes on the vine.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“The offal vendor folded a beef tongue, wrapped it in paper, passed it to a Chinese woman and wiped the sprinkles of blood from the price tag with a damp washcloth.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“For three days the child lay in his parents' house, surrounded by spring flowers, narcissus, tulips, and Christmas roses, in a sealed coffin, small & white.”
― Josef Winkler, When the Time Comes

“Zwei Tote heben ihre Köpfe. Auf der Bettdecke ihrer Erde stehen die Lebenden. Die beiden Gräber murmeln.”
― Josef Winkler

“With an air somewhat distraught, nostalgic, and sad, a Spanish teenager glanced at the face and bust of a Sicilian-speaking postulant selling holy paraphernalia, who shook hundreds of small statues of Christ out of numerous plastic bags, letting them fall crackling into a trunk, while his father, rooting around in the bowl, taking one tiny crucifix after another in his hands, stared at them appraisingly.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“Another gypsy girl — two gold upper teeth shone in the void of her harelip — lifted her right breast slightly and placed her nipple in the mouth of her child, whose eyelids were sealed shut with pus.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“Ein neapolitanischen Dialekt sprechendes Nonnenzwillingspaar leckte an den mit Schokolade bestrichenen Zehen eines Eises in Kinderfußform.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta

“The long, damp eyelash hairs of his open left eye grazed his eyebrow, the long, blood-caked eyelash hairs of his closed right eye grazed his freckle-dotted cheek.”
― Josef Winkler, Natura morta