Imre Kertész: Citations en anglais (Page 2)

“Maybe I'm worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed.”

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Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)
Contexte: The régime was overthrown, and I'm not going to pretend it was me who overthrew it. A general liquidation is in full swing, and I'm not going to join in. I've become a spectator. And I'm not even spectating from the front rows in the stalls but from somewhere up in the gods. Maybe I'm worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed. That would be the unseemlier alternative, because then they would have smashed my ear in for no reason at all. That is the assumption I'm inclining to these days. (He breaks off and ponders, book in hand.) I did time for no reason, dragged the millstone of a police record around for no reason, was on probation for years for no reason, and I'm no hero, I merely botched up my life.

“Giving state support to literature is the state's sneaky way for the state liquidation of literature.”

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Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)
Contexte: The state is always the same. The only reason it financed literature up till now was in order to liquidate it. Giving state support to literature is the state's sneaky way for the state liquidation of literature.

“If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago.”

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Imre Kertész

Liquidation (2003)
Contexte: That evening he talked about Leonardo and Michelangelo. It is impossible to place them in the human world, he said. It is impossible to comprehend how anything that attests to greatness has survived; it is obviously a result of innumerable chance events and of human incomprehension, he said. If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago. Fortunately, people have lost their flair for greatness and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to point of greatness, he said.

“It seems that only one philosophy can succeed the philosophy of existentialism: nonexistentialism, the philosophy of nonexistent existence.”

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Imre Kertész

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 30.
Contexte: I exist. Is this a life still? No, just vegetating. It seems that only one philosophy can succeed the philosophy of existentialism: nonexistentialism, the philosophy of nonexistent existence.

“If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense.”

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Imre Kertész

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 69.
Contexte: If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life.

“I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world.”

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Imre Kertész

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 37.
Contexte: I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!