Pramoedya Ananta Toer Quotes

Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total.

I don't follow any kind of 'isms.' If there is one, it will be Pram-ism.

Let us see whether it is the New Order or me who will be the loser before Indonesian history. I have won. The New Order has fallen and my writings have been translated into 40 languages.

The fracture of pencil still useful, but the fracture of soul, we couldn't use it, Mister.

I did not succeed in everything I did. And even where it did seem I was succeeding it was not always the case. The human heart has a million facets.

At the beginning of all growth, everything imitates.

An educated person must learn to act justly, beginning, first of all, with his thoughts, then later in his deeds. That is what it means to be educated.

I'll do as I please. My mind is not to be imprisoned.

I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail. When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.

Even though no one admits it, writers are leaders in their communities.

I don't write to give joy to readers but to give them a conscience.

Every award for me is important because it means a slap against militarism and fascism in Indonesia.

Such was the love of this grandson for his grandmother that two years after the death of his mother, when she herself fell gravely ill, he vowed to her that someday he would try to tell the world her life story. 'But why?' she asked humbly. 'I'm no one, just a girl from the coast' 'But you are everyone, Grandma,' the young Pramoedya told her. 'You are all the people who have ever had to fight to make this life their own.

Humankind is able to create new conditions, a new reality. We are not fated to swim forever among the realities that are here now. ... Everything that is worthwhile in human civilization has not only originated from but has been inspired by dreams, by imagination.

Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.

It's proper that people have friends, friendships without self-interest. Without friends, life is too lonely.

Every book that is banned is a badge of honor.

I will not close my eyes, neither those in my head nor those in my soul, as the ship carries me away, along with my future, my dreams, and my beliefs. Buru Island is no happy land somewhere; it's but a way station on my journey in life—though to believe even that much will require no small measure of hope.

A mother knows what her child's gone through, even if she didn't see it herself.

Life can give everything to whoever tries to understand and is willing to receive new knowledge.