Faith, thought Eszter, recognizing his own stupidity, is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; i… - László Krasznahorkai

it’s precisely the infinite that casts light upon how the brain thinks, and how clever it is in showing us something that seems real when it’s merely an abstraction, namely that brain introduced or employed to great effect those methods of distortion, that dislocation

He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself — utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials — into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of someday finding his way back home.

...I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me, because I've looked into what's coming, and I don't need anything from here.