Imre Kertész Quotes

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.

Boredom. He takes it with him everywhere, like an angry shaggy terrier that he sets on others from time to time.

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

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.

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.

How can we do justice even when it concerns truth itself, since for me only one truth exists, my truth, even if it is a delusion, yes, my delusion; my delusion.

"No" — I could never be another person’s father, fate, god, "No" — it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).

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.

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?

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

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

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

Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience;

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

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