László Krasznahorkai Quotes

نحن غارقون في الخراء يا صديقي، ولا نستطيع أن نفعل شيئًا في هذا الشأن إلى حين، علينا البقاء معهم

Ma quando vide che anche qui sulla Terra, nella città dove viveva, le storie e gli eventi, i movimenti e le intenzioni, si ripetevano tutti secondo un ordine, incominciò a girare tra i suoi compagni inconsciamente convinto che era assurdo cercare cambiamenti laddove non ce n’erano, e non bisognava far altro che eseguire senza sosta – come una goccia di pioggia che cade si stacca dalla nuvola – il compito assegnatoci.

...the task was not to choose but to accept, there being no obligation to choose between what was appropriate and what was inappropriate, only to accept that we are not obliged to do anything except to comprehend that the appropriateness of the one great universal process of thinking is not predicated on it being correct, for there was nothing to compare it with, nothing but its own beauty, and it was its beauty that gave us confidence in its truth — and this, said Korin, was what struck him as he walked those hundred furiously-thinking paces on the evening of his birthday: that is to say he understood the infinite significance of faith and was given a new insight into what the ancients had long known, that it was faith in its existence that had both created and maintained the world; the corollary of which was that it was the loss of his own faith that was now erasing it, the result of which realization being, he said, that he experienced a sudden, utterly numbing, quite awful feeling of abundance...

…era alquanto facilitato nel sentire l’umana nullità rispetto al vertiginoso infinito della volta celeste, si muoveva libero nello spazio immenso e imperscrutabile come se quello fosse il suo vero mondo, in questo, prigioniero della sua libertà, non riusciva a trovare posto, soffocato dall’incommensurabile ristrettezza di tale “desolante aridità”…

Sheltered spots tend to increase your fear, the fear of the unknown perils of outside,
a fear that simply regenerates and reinforces itself until it becomes overwhelming,
making you incapable of drawing conclusions about what's really taking place outside.

What is behind me still remains ahead of me.

...we must never lose sight of that gaze with which we look at things.

When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That’s how it works.

The unchained workers of decay were waiting in a dormant state for the necessary conditions to be established, as soon enough they would be, when they might recommence their interrupted struggle, that predetermined, merciless assault in the course of which they would dismantle whatever had been alive once and once only, reducing it into tiny insignificant pieces under the eternally silent cover of death.

But nothing could assuage the unconscious fury of our new and tragic understanding, our sense of having been cheated, our fear, for, however we looked for it, we could not find a fit object for our disgust and despair, and so we attacked everything in our way with an equal and infinite passion…

He heard hundreds of exhausted feet scraping the ground behind him, he saw the stray cats at his own feet as they scattered in fear before the silently advancing mass of raised iron stakes, but he felt nothing except the weight of the hand on his shoulder steering him through the army of fur caps and heavy boots. Don't be afraid, the other man repeated. Valuska gave a quick nod and glanced up at the sky. He glanced up and suddenly had the sensation that the sky wasn't where it was supposed to be; terrified, he looked up again and confirmed the fact that there was indeed nothing there, so he bowed his head and surrendered to the fur caps and boots, realizing that it was no use to search because what he sought was lost, swallowed up by this coming together of forces, of details, of this earth, this marching.

...because he came here on the wrong day, because he was born in the wrong time, because he had been born, it was all wrong from the very beginning, he should have known, should have sensed, that today was not the day to begin anything, nor was tomorrow, there were no days before him now, as there had never even been any, just as there was not and never would be a day...

Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.

"egyszerűen csak arról van szó, magyarázta később a hét gyereknek, hogy egy napon ,"eltört nála a mécses", mert most ha visszagondol, az ő története valójában nem is azzal a bizonyos folyóparttal indult, hanem jóval korábban, jóval a folyóparti események előtt, amikor egyszer elfogta egy addig ismeretlen, egy addig teljességgel ismeretlen mélységű és az ő egész lényét alapjaiban megrázó elkeseredés, hirtelen, egyik napról a másikra egyszer csak azon vette észre magát, hogy nagyon, hogy halálosan el van keseredve, amiként akkoriban fogalmazott, "a világ állapota" miatt, és ez nem valami gyorsan érkező és gyorsan múló hangulat következtében állt nála elő, hanem hát, ez egy olyan iszonyú éles bevillanás volt, mondta, ami örökre beég, tudniillik bevillant neki, hogy a világban, ha volt is, már nincsen semmiféle nemes, nem akarja eltúlozni, de tényleg, komolyan, hogy őkörülötte talán nem is volt, mindenesetre soha többé nem is lesz se szép, se jó"

"Catastrophe! Of course! Last judgement! Horseshit! It's you that are the catastrophe, you're the bloody last judgement, your feet don't even touch the ground, you bunch of sleepwalkers. I wish you were dead, the lot of you. Let's make a bet,' and here he shook Nadaban by the shoulders, ‘that you don't even know what I'm talking about!! Because you don't talk, you "whisper" or "expostulate"; you don't walk down the street but "proceed feverishly"; you don't enter a place but "cross its threshold", you don't feel cold or hot, but "find yourselves shivering" or "feeling the sweat pour down you"! I haven't heard a straight word for hours, you can only mew and caterwaul; because if a hooligan throws a brick through your window you invoke the last judgement, because your brains are addled and filled up with steam, because if someone sticks your nose in shit all you do is sniff, stare and cry "sorcery!