Top 15 Imre Kertész Quotes

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 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.

"You mustn’t forget about your future, Enrique." "I’m living for the present, Dad." "Ah!" he waved that aside. "The present is just temporary."
‘ I boiled up. "I know," I burst out. ‘It only has to be accepted temporarily — temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die.

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.

Talking is not enough; words don’t clarify anything. I’ll have to hit upon something, but what?

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

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

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.

Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot.

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.

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

Anyone who wants something else is Jewish.

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.

A person’s true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all.

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