László Krasznahorkai Quotes

Halics’s whole body felt as though it had lost definition and, as for his coat, it had lost whatever resistance to water it once had nor could it protect him from the roaring cataract of fate, or, as he tended to say, “the rain of death in the heart,” a rain that beat, day and night, against both his withered heart and defenseless organs.

It is not always necessary to search for the cause behind everything, because every cause is unfounded. A cause only looks like a cause from a certain viewpoint.

...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...

There is a war going on out there, and it's only worth waking to the dying night if you are prepared to be utterly ruthless'; a war - he kept scanning the rooftops - where everything is engaged in a conflict that has no rules; a war in which one side must continually besiege the other, in which to aim at anything but victory was pointless. It was a struggle in which the only power to remain standing was that which looked for no reasons, which was content to accept that the whole thing should remain without an explanation, because - and here he remembered The Prince's advice - it simply didn't exist...

...megértette, hogy mindaz, amit mi a létből érzékelünk, nem más, mint a hiábavalóság felfoghatatlan terjedelmű emlékműve, mely az idők végezetéig ismétli önmagát, és hogy nem, korántsem a véletlen szerkeszti a maga rettenetes, kiapadhatatlan, diadalmas, legyőzhetetlen erejével, hogy dolgok szülessenek és szétessenek, hanem mintha egy homályos, démoni szándék dolgozna itt, és ez olyan mértékben bele van szerekesztve a dolgokba és a dolgok közti állapotok szövetébe, hogy a szándék bűze mindent betölt, egy kárhozat tehát, egy megvetés műve a világ, ez csapja meg agyát annak, aki gondolkodni kezd, ezért ő nem is gondolkodik, megtanult nem gondolkodni többé, ami természetesen nem vezetett sehová, mert azt a bűzt csak érzi, bármerre néz, bármerre fordítja a fejét, ez a bűz ott van, mert végül is az ítélet, mely szintén azonos a világgal, azt is tartalmazza, hogy a hiábavalóságnak is és megvetésnek is, mely a szándék formáját öltötte fel, a tudatában kell legyen, a hiábavalóságnak és a megvetésnek is, folyton, minden egyes pillanatban, aki gondolkodni kezd, viszont elég lemondani a gondolkodásról, és csak nézni a dolgokat, már létre is jön a gondolkodás új alakban, vagyis megszabadulni nem lehet, akár gondolkodik az ember, akár nem gondolkodik, mindenképpen a gondolkodás foglya, és iszonyatosan facsarja az orrát a bűz, így hát ő mit tehetne, áltatja magát, azzal áltatja, hogy hagyja, menjenek a dolgok a maguk természetes útján...

We have reached the end of one era, and now we don't know what is all around us. Because we're already in a new era, and it is very different from the old one. Science and the world of technology are both changing everything so quickly, even our bodies. So the original ancient culture was present here, but to no avail, at this point in history it has come to stop. It still has some effect, some kind of continuity, but it cannot analyse and reformulate things, it cannot impact things with absolute strength. The age to follow will be full of dangers. It will be full of difficulties. In all likelihood, it will not be a good future for mankind. It is even possible this new era will mean the end of mankind.

mire ő kijelentette, hogy magyarok nincsenek, hungarian no exist, már kihaltak, they died out, körülbelül úgy száz-százötven évvel ezelőtt kezdődött, és valami hihetetlen módon, tudniillik teljesen észrevétlenül, hungarian?, no exist?, csóválta meg a fejét hitetlenkedve a nő, yes, they died out, erősítette meg határozottan Korim, valamikor a múlt századtól fogva, mivel volt itt egy nagyon nagy keveredés, amiben a végére nem maradt egyetlen magyar sem, csak egy keverék, meg néhány sváb, cigány, szlovák meg osztrák meg zsidó meg román meg horvát meg szerb és így to- vább, és főleg ezeknek a keveréke, de a magyarok eltűntek közben, győzködte a nőt Korim, csak Magyarország van még meg a magyarok helyén, Hungary yes, hungarian not, de már egyetlen őszinte, ép emlék se arról, micsoda különös, nagyszerű, büszke, fékezhetetlen népség volt ez itt, mert az volt, nagyon vad és nagyon tiszta törvények között, akiket kizárólag a nagy tettek örökös véghezvitele tartott ébren, barbárok, akik aztán lassan elvesztették az érdeklődésüket a kis tettekre berendezkedett világ iránt, és elvesztek, degenerálódtak, kipusztultak és elkeveredtek, és nem maradt belőlük más, csak a nyelvük, a költészetük és valami apró, hogyan?, jelezte akkor a nő a homlokát ráncolva, hogy nem érti, de így történt, és az a legérdekesebb, bár őt már nem érdekli egyáltalán, hogy degenerálódásukról és kihalásukról nem beszél senki, az egész ügyről nincs más, csak hazugság, tévedés, félreértés és hülyeség

He gained height, grew thin, the hair on his temples had begun to grey, but, now as then, he had none of that useful sense of proportion, nor could he ever develop anything of the sort, which might have helped him distinguish between the continuous flux of the universe of which he constituted a part (though a necessarily fleeting part) and the passage of time, the perception of which might have led to an intuitive and wise acceptance of fate. Despite vain efforts to understand and experience what precisely his 'dear friends' wanted from each other, he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and (to his mother's inordinate shame and the extreme amusement of the locals) had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted - as his great friend once said, not entirely without point - 'blindly and tirelessly... with the incurable beauty of his personal cosmos' in his soul [...]

"Everything's in ruins, everything's been degraded, but I could say that they've ruined and degraded everything, because this is not some kind of cataclysm coming about with so-called "innocent" human aid, on the contrary, it's about man's own judgment over his own self, which of course god has a big hand in, or, dare I say, takes part in, and whatever he takes part in is the most ghastly creation that you can imagine, because, you see, the world has been debased, so it doesn't matter what I say because everything has been debased that they've acquired and since they've acquired everything in a sneaky, underhanded fight, they've debased everything, because whatever they touch, and they touch everything, they've debased; this is the way it was until the final victory, until the triumphant end; acquire, debase, debase, acquire; or I can put it differently if you'd like, to touch, debase and thereby acquire, or touch, acquire and thereby debase; it's been going on like this for centuries, on, on and on; this and only this, sometimes on the sly, sometimes rudely, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, but it has been going on and on; yet only in one way; like a rat attacks from ambush; because for this perfect victory it was also essential that the other side, that is, everything's that's excellent, great in some way and noble, should not engage in any kind of fight, there shouldn't be any kind of struggle, just the sudden disappearance of one side meaning the disappearing of the excellent, the great, the noble, so that by now the winners who have won by attacking from ambush rule the earth and there isn't a single tiny nook where one can hide something from them because everything they can lay their hands on is theirs, even things that they can't reach but they do reach are also theirs; the heavens are already theirs and theirs are all our dreams; theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence; even immortality is theirs, you understand?; everything, everything is lost

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.

Only the land remained, the silent order of the mountains, the ground covered in fallen dead leaves in the enormous space, a boundless expanse - disguising, concealing, hiding, covering all that lies below the burning earth.

In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent scritch-scratch of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they don't hang together. So with the door left open as if forever, with the lock that will never open. There is a chasm, a crevice.

empirical evidence is precisely that which is sacred in so-called scientific thought, and by these means — there’s no point in denying it — we can go far, but at the same time, by following this method, we greatly distance ourselves from the problem, because it’s so, but so manifest that empirical proof itself is something that no one has ever heretofore truly dealt with, namely, no one has ever wished genuinely to confront the deeply problematic nature of empirical verification as such, because whoever did this went mad, or appeared to be a pure dilettante,

What is behind me still remains ahead of me.

There is an intense relationship between proximate objects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as for the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God.