Imre Kertész: Trending quotes

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Imre Kertész: 122 quotes8 likes

“"Auschwitz cannot be explained." And yet, it doesn’t take a Wittgenstein to notice that the sentence is faulty even from the point of pure linguistic logic;”

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)

“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.”

Imre Kertész

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 31.

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

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

“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.”

Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)

“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.”

Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)

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

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

“I stayed alive therefore I am.”

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Imre Kertész

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 35.

“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.”

Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)

“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.”

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

“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.”

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

“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.”

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Imre Kertész

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 15.

“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.”

Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)

“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.”

Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)