Imre Kertész Quotes

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

But there are times when being happy — just happy, nothing else — is simply vile." "Why?" Jill inquired. "Because," Enrique reasoned, "one cant be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If one takes the path of success, then one ends up either successful or unsuccessful, there is no third alternative.

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.

He himself had said near enough exactly what was in the play. The only snag was that by the time that scene was played out in reality, almost word for word, the person who had written the play, and that scene in it, was no longer alive. He had committed suicide.

I have felt that some sort of awful shame is attached to my name and that I have somehow brought this shame along from somewhere I have never been, and that I have carried this sin as my sin even though I have never committed it; this sin pursues me all my life, which life is undoubtedly not my own even thought I live it , I suffer from it die of it.

For Kingbitter the Hamlet question did not run “To be or not to be?” but “Am I or am I not?”.

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.