Imre Kertész > Quotes

“You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“As we pass one step, and as we recognize it as being behind us, the next one already rises up before us. By the time we learn everything, we slowly come to understand it. And while you come to understand everything gradually, you don't remain idle at any moment: you are already attending to your new business; you live, you act, you move, you fulfill the new requirements of every new step of development. If, on the other hand, there were no schedule, no gradual enlightenment, if all the knowledge descended on you at once right there in one spot, then it's possible neither your brains nor your heart could bear it.”
― Imre Kertész, Fatelessness

“...I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.”
― Imre Kertesz, Fateless

“A leitura é como que uma droga que confere um adormecimento agradável aos contornos da crueldade da vida.”
― Imre Kertész

“I read somewhere; while God still existed one sustained a dialogue with God, and now that He no longer exists one has to sustain a dialogue with other people, I guess, or, better still, with oneself, that is to say, one talks or mumbles to oneself.”
― Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child

“The West in general should stand up more for its own values. It is not always worthwhile to compromise.”
― imre kertesz

“Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“منذ أن خاضت بلادى حربها ضد العالم المتحضر وبالدرجة الأولى ضد نفسها كانت كل القوانين لا قانونية.”
― Imre Kertész, الراية الإنجليزية، المحضر

“إن الإنسان فى حاجه إلى الفرح أثناء فترات الإستراحه النادرة التى تتخلل عذابه.”
― Imre Kertész, الراية الإنجليزية، المحضر

“أن تتحلى بالأخلاق فى عالم بلا أخلاق أمر غير أخلاقى.”
― Imre Kertész, الراية الإنجليزية، المحضر

“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.”
― Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child

“Kurti had believed in politics, and politics had deceived him, the way politics deceives everyone.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.”
― Imre Kertész, Fatelessness

“يخاف من الجلاد حتى الذى لا يخاف الموت.”
― Imre Kertész, الراية الإنجليزية، المحضر

“It was not very likely, of course, but then all kinds of things are possible, after all.”
― Imre Kertész, Fatelessness

“Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.
A person’s true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“No" — I could never be another person’s father, fate, god,
"No" — it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).”
― Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child

“Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along the front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“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.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“I can see the young man on dizzily autumn mornings, the fog of which he inhaled just like the rapidly evaporating freedom.”
― Imre Kertész, The Union Jack

“One is not born for anything in particular, but if one manages to stay alive long enough, then one cannot avoid eventually becoming something.”
― Imre Kertész, Dossier K: A Memoir

“Des quantités de livres dorment ainsi en moi, des bons et des mauvais, de tout genre. Des phrases, des mots, des alinéas et des vers qui, pareils à des locataires remuants, reviennent brusquement à la vie, errent solitaires ou entament dans ma tête de bruyants bavardages que je suis incapable de faire taire.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“Despite all deliberation, sense, insight, and sober reason, I could not fail to recognize within myself the furtive and yet—ashamed as it might be, so to say, of its irrationality—increasingly insistent voice of some muffled craving of sorts: I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.”
― Imre Kertész, Fatelessness

“La lecture est comme une drogue qui confère un agréable flou au cruels contours de la vie.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“the confines of prison walls cannot impose boundaries on the flights of one’s fantasy”
― Imre Kertész, Fatelessness

“Мога да заявя, че няма по-мъчително, по-разочароващо нещо от това ден след ден да следиш, ден след ден да откриваш какво е унищожено в тебе.”
― Imre Kertész, Fatelessness

“Sólo en Zeitz comprendí que la vida de un preso también tiene días laborables, mejor dicho, que la vida de un preso sólo tiene días laborables, todos iguales. Era como si ya hubiera estado en una situación similar, en el tren, camino a Auschwitz. Allí también todo dependía del tiempo y de la habilidad de cada uno. Pero en Zeitz era peor; para seguir con el mismo ejemplo, tenía la sensación de que el tren se había detenido indefinidamente, pero, por otra parte, delante, a mi alrededor e incluso dentro de mí era como si corriera a toda velocidad: apenas podía asimilar los repentinos cambios que se producían a mi alrededor y en mi interior.”
― Imre Kertész, Sin destino

“Srce mi je teško poput kamenih blokova stepenica.”
― Imre Kertész

“И бросьте вы наконец твердить, сказал, должно быть, я, что Освенциму нет объяснения, что Освенцим — порождение иррациональных, не доступных разуму сил, ибо для зла всегда найдется рациональное объяснение; возможно, сам Сатана, как Яго, иррационален, но создания его, да-да, они — существа рациональные, любой их поступок можно вывести, как математическую формулу, вывести из каких-нибудь интересов, корысти, лени, властолюбия, похоти, трусости, необходимости удовлетворить тот или иной инстинкт, а если все это не подойдет, то в конечном счете из какого-нибудь психического отклонения, паранойи, депрессивной мании, пиромании, садизма, сексуальной одержимости, мазохизма, демиургийской или иной мегаломании, некрофилии, да Бог знает, из какого еще извращения из великого множества извращений, а может, из всех из них сразу.”
― Imre Kertész

“...една жена с плаха усмивка и плавни движения, с архаичната маска на босонога слугиня с разпуснати коси тихо и свенливо моли да я пусна в моето ultimum moriens, т. е. в сърцето си, там се оглежда с мила и любопитна усмивка, докосва всичко с нежна ръка, тук-таме забърсва праха, проветрява застоялите кътчета, изхвърля едно-друго и на мястото нарежда собствените си вещи, настанява се изящно, акуратно и неотразимо, докато накрая осъзнавам, че съм напълно изтикан оттам и потиснат, като чужденец в изгнание, обикалям собственото си сърце, което ми се мержелее в далечината със затворени врати, както нечий топъл дом за бездомника; и доста често успявам да се нанеса обратно само ако се върна с друга жена под ръка и я настаня там.”
― Imre Kertész, Кадиш за нероденото дете