Imre Kertész: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.”

“I took a stroll in the city. It was infernally hot. The usual evening hubbub around me. Lovers on the pavements, hurrying to cinemas and other places of amusement as if nothing had happened, nothing. Living their nonexistent lives. Or do they exit, and it’s me who doesn’t.”

“Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience;”

“Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life.”

“Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter. We imagine a man, and a name to go with him. Or conversely, let us imagine the name, and the man to go with it.”

“I do what I have to do, although I don’t know why I have to.”

“At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn’t know why.”

“I stayed alive therefore I am.”

“Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.”

“You just sit here and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.”

“I read somewhere; while God still existed one sustained a dialogue with God, and now that He no longer exists one has to sustain a dialogue with other people, I guess, or, better still, with oneself, that is to say, one talks or mumbles to oneself.”

“The world is not our imagination but our nightmare, full of inconceivable surprises.”

“My body is foreign to me that body that sustains me and will, ultimately, kill me.”

“The sentence "Auschwitz cannot be explained" is faulty simply from a formal point of view, for anything that is has an explanation, even if by necessity a merely self-serving faulty, so so explanation.”

“On the other hand, what is really irrational and what truly cannot be explained is not evil but, contrarily, the good.”

“By way of that wretched sentence "Auschwitz cannot be explained" is the wretched author explaining that we should be silent concerning Auschwitz, that Auschwitz doesn’t exist, or, rather, that it didn’t, for the only facts that cannot be explained are those that don’t or didn’t exist.”

“There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution.”

“True, he had been living a lively interior life today: he had dreamed something, he had awoken with an erection, and while shaving he had been dogged by a feeling that today he needed to decide, though he could not see clearly what it was he needed to decide, besides which he was all too aware of his own inability to make any decisions.
Despite that, the thought did cross Kingbitter's mind that he ought to do something about finding a theater to do the play, the comedy (or tragedy?) "Liquidation."
He was now in the ninth year of considering that.
Indeed, Kingbitter was now in the ninth year of considering whether he was handling the literary estate with due diligence.”

“Everyone here makes a botch of his life. That's the local specialty, the genius loci. Anyone who doesn't botch up his life here simply has no talent.”