What we usually mean by fate is what we least understand, that is to say, ourselves, that subversive, unknown individual constantly plotting against … - Imre Kertész

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.

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.

But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.