László Krasznahorkai Quotes

(...) he was lost in successive waves of time, coolly aware of the minimal speck of his own being, seeing himself as the defenseless, helpless victim of the earth’s crust, the brittle arc of his life between birth and death caught up in the dumb struggle between surging seas and rising hills, and it was as if he could already feel the gentle tremor beneath the chair supporting his bloated body, a tremor that might be the harbinger of seas about to break in on him, a pointless warning to flee before its all-encompassing power made escape impossible, and he could see himself running, part of a desperate, terrified stampede comprising stags, bears, rabbits, deer, rats, insects and reptiles, dogs and men, just so many futile, meaningless lives in the common, incomprehensible devastation, while above them flapped clouds of birds, dropping in exhaustion, offering the only possible hope.

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.

...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...

at this point, we must refocus our attention on this, as fear is what defines human existence,
...you will see that fear is the deepest element that can be grasped in this organic and inorganic world, and there’s nothing else other than fear, because nothing else bears within it such dreadful strength

...how could he explain how long ago he had given up the idea of thought, the point at which he first understood the way things were and knew that any sense we had of existence was merely a reminder of the incomprehensible futility of existence, a futility that would repeat itself ad infinitum, to the end of time and that, no, it wasn't a matter of chance and its extraordinary, inexhaustible, triumphant, unconquerable power working to bring matters to birth or annihilation, but rather the matter of a shadowy demonic purpose, something embedded deep in the heart of things, in the texture of the relationship between things, the stench of whose purpose filled every atom, that it was a curse, a form of damnation, that the world was the product of scorn, and God help the sanity of those who called themselves thinkers, which was why he no longer thought, had learned not to think any more, not that this led anywhere, of course, because wherever he looked, whichever way he turned, there was that all-pervasive stench, the stench that was there because the last word, the word that comprehended the knowledge that futility and scorn, replete with purpose, was coextensive with the world, was the world, was something of which he had to be conscious, an eternity of futility and scorn that obtained in each and every second of life for those who had set out as thinkers, futility because as soon as you abandoned thought and tried simply to look at things, thought cropped up again in a new form, a form from which, in other words, there was no escape whatever man thought or did not think, because he remained the prisoner of thought either way, and his nose was deeply pained by the stench of it, so what could he do except console himself with the thought that events simply followed their own natural course...

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

Tam o anda tüm olan biteni neyin harekete geçirdiğini kavradı, varoluşun itici gücünün mecburiter olduğunu, itici gücün motivasyonu doğurduğunu, motivasyonun ise belirlenmiş ilişkiler içinde saldırgan bir katılımı sağladığını, varlığımızın bulunduğu bu katılım noktasından, araştırmacı reflekslerinin önceden belirlenmiş dizisini kullanarak kendisi için faydalı olanı bulmaya çabaladığı noktada, varlığın tümlüğünün aslında bu arzulanan ilişkinin gerçekte var olup olmamasına bağlı olduğunu, tüm bunların sabrın yeterliliğine, mücadelenin incelikli noktalarına ve tesadüflerine göre şekillendiği ve başarılı hareketin, benliksiz varlığın, tam deneme yanılma niteliği taşıdığını kavradı.

They’re waiting patiently, like the long-suffering lot they are, in the firm conviction that someone has conned them. They are waiting, belly to the ground, like cats at pig-killing time, hoping for scraps

A fost o greseala. Pentru ca adineauri am inteles ca intre mine si o insecta, intre o insecta si un rau, intre un rau si un strigat, care se arcuieste peste acesta, nu este nici o deosebire. Totul functioneaza gol si fara noima sub presiunea dependentei si a unui stravechi balans salbatic, astfel ca numai imaginatia, nicidecum esecul etern al simturilor, ne ispiteste neincetat cu credinta, ca sa putem iesi din viziunile mizeriei.

To be more accurate, Eszter continued, it was only a shadow in the mirror, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided though the shadow nevertheless tried to separate them, to separate two things that had from eternity been the same and could not be separated or cut into two, thereby losing the weightless delight of being swept along with it, substituting, he thought as he stepped away from the drawing-room window, a solid eternity purchased with knowledge for the sweet song of participating in eternity, a song so airy it was lighter than a feather.

Tam o anda tüm olan biteni neyin harekete geçirdiğini kavradı, varoluşun itici gücünün mecburiyet olduğunu, itici gücün motivasyonu doğurduğunu, motivasyonun ise belirlenmiş ilişkiler içinde saldırgan bir katılımı sağladığını, varlığımızın bulunduğu bu katılım noktasından, araştırmacı reflekslerinin önceden belirlenmiş dizisini kullanarak kendisi için faydalı olanı bulmaya çabaladığı noktada, varlığın tümlüğünün aslında bu arzulanan ilişkinin gerçekte var olup olmamasına bağlı olduğunu, tüm bunların sabrın yeterliliğine, mücadelenin incelikli noktalarına ve tesadüflerine göre şekillendiği ve başarılı hareketin, benliksiz varlığın, tam deneme yanılma niteliği taşıdığını kavradı.

...and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ's sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at age 44, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last 44 years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for 44 years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in an effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand, was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when, after a couple of days, he noticed that there was something the matter with his head.

..but if it does occur, then anyone can comprehend that above us and below us, outside of ourselves and deep within ourselves, there is a universe, the one and only, which is not identical with the sky looming above us overhead, because that universe is not made of stars and planets and suns and galaxies, because that universe is not a picture, it cannot be seen, it doesn't even have a name, for it is so much more precious than anything that could have a name, and that is why it is such a joy to me that I can practice Seiobo; Seiobo is the emissary who arrives and says I am not the desire for peace, I am peace itself; Seiobo arrives and says do not be afraid, for the universe of peace is not the rainbow of yearning; the universe, the real universe — already exists.

[...] for it was the approaching dawn that held him in its spell, that 'promise kept each morning' that the earth, along with the town and his own person, would emerge from beneath the shadow of the night, and that the delicate glimmer of dawn would yield to the bright light of day...

It was the kind of nightmare where you realize that the missing weight of things is sitting right there on your chest, like some kind of succubus, but before you can shove it off, it gets sucked away through a mysterious process into the unknowable realm of your cells, and from there on you are defenseless, your cells already weigh a ton, while your whole body is so light it almost floats, and that’s how it goes until you can only wonder how the cells could be so unbearably heavy when the body is so nauseatingly light, and in this nauseating lightheadedness things gradually recede from you just as you too begin to gradually recede from them, in a word it is like when a person lugging a load becomes exhausted by all this lugging and suddenly looking down at his hands sees that there is nothing in them, there never was, that he had been lugging nothing — that is, when you suddenly realize that something is no longer in your possession, just as nothing ever had been.