Imre Kertész Quotes

Cognitively we don’t know and will never discover what occasions the cause of our existence, we don’t know the purpose of our existence and we don’t know why we have to disappear from here once we have been placed here, I don’t know, why I have to live this fragmentary existence, which happened to be my lot, instead of a life that perhaps does exist somewhere. Why did I get this lot? This sex, this body, this awareness, this geographic setting, this fate, this language, this history, this rented room?

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.

To live and to write, it's all the same, both together, for the pen is my spade; when I look ahead I only look back, when I stare at the paper I only see the past: she crossed that bluish green carpet as if she were crossing the sea because she wanted to talk to me, for she found out that I was "B.", author and literary translator, one of whose "works" had read, and which she definitely wanted to discuss with me, she said, and we talked and talked until we talked ourselves into bed — Good God! — and continued to talk even then, uninterrupted.

I live and occasionally I look up at the glorious air or the clouds into which I keep digging my grave with my pen, diligently, like a forced laborer, whom they order every day to dig deeper with his spade…

Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species. We are all survivors, that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz.

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

But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.

Nothing upsets me as much as a shop window jammed full of objects; such windows literally depress, sadden, even demoralize me.

I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!

... mert ami valóban irracionális, az nem a rossz, ellenkezőleg: a jó.

There was truth in Diaz’s logic, yes: our line of work is like that. Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward.

If you’re a revolutionary, you shouldn’t have started a family.

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

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.

Auschwitz, I told her, appears to me in the image of a father; yes, the two terms, Auschwitz, and father, resonate the same echoes in me, and if the observation is that God is an exalted father, then God, too is revealed to me in the image of Auschwitz.