Jean Améry > Quotes

“Life ... is a burden. The day about to begin is an oppressive weight.... The erect penis is heavy, even heavier the hanging one. Even the most tender breast has to be dragged along.”
― Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death

“I am true only as I see and understand myself deep within; I am what I am for myself and in myself, and nothing else.”
― Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

“[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.”
― Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

“The poem no longer transcended reality.”
― Jean Améry

“Rien n'arrive ni comme on l'espère, ni comme on le craint', dice Proust en algún pasaje de su obra. Nada, en efecto, sucede como lo esperamos ni como lo tememos.”
― Jean Améry, Más allá de la culpa y la expiación. Tentativas de superación de una víctima de una violencia.

“רק בשמי מותר לי לדבר - ואף על פי כן, גם אם בזהירות, בשמם של אותם מבני דורי, מליונים מן הסתם, שיהדותם ניחתה בם פתאום, כמכח איתני טבע, והיה עליהם לעמוד בה בלי אלוהים, בלי היסטוריה, בלי אמונה משחית יהודית. לגביהם, לגבי, להיות יהודי פירושו לחוש בתוך את משא הטרגדיה של אמש. על אמת ידי השמאלית חקוק המספר של אושוויץ; קצר הוא לקריאה מן החומש ומן התלמוד, ובכל זאת יש בו מידע ממצה יותר. הוא אף מהימן יותר בתור נוסחת יסוד הקיום היהודי. כשאני אומר לעצמי ולעולם, כולל ליהודים המחזיקים ביהדותם מטעמים דתיים ולאומיים, שאינם רואים בי אחד משלהם, כשאני אומר: 'אני יהודי', אני מתכוון בכך אל העובדות והאפשרויות המקופלות במספר של אושוויץ" - ז'אן אמרי מתוך "מעבר לאשמה ולכפרה" [At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities]”
― Jean Améry , At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

“This man is a consummate writer, in line with that dictum of Thomas Mann’s: one for whom writing is especially hard.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Flaubert’s irony is hard, maybe even wicked, in any case profoundly unfair. Let us take a look at one of the most important figures from Madame Bovary, the apothecary Homais, and then proceed from his example. In him, bourgeois enlightenment, the heritage of our civilization, the indispensable fundament of every socialist utopia, finds itself cast into monstrous ridicule.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“His assets—inherited, not earned—had vanished. If the book had been brought to its end, the hopeless imbeciles Bouvard and Pécuchet would have logically sought refuge in death.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“أي شخص تعرَّض للتعذيب يظل معذَّبًا. أي شخص عانى من التعذيب لن يقدر أبدًا على الشعور بالاطمئنان مرة أخرى في العالم. إن الإيمان بالإنسانية، الذي تصدَّع بالفعل إثر أول صفعة على الوجه، ثم هدَمه التعذيب، لا يمكن أبدًا اكتسابه مرة أخرى.”
― Jean Améry

“not as world, but as surroundings; he experienced them the way one observes the fauna in a landscape, as dainty, odious, even repugnant and worthy of extermination; and the question should remain open as to how well he knew the members of his own class, and what sympathy he may have felt for them.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Çünkü yaşlanmak, bizi gitgide artan bir yoğunlukla, geçmişin hatırasına bağımlı kılar”
― Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

“I demand a closed chamber, for regrettably, what the accused has proposed to reveal here is a danger to public morals. The defendant, infected by his wife’s dissoluteness, which judicial language lacks words to describe, is the most appalling specimen I have ever come across in the long course of my life as a guardian of order and morals. Look at him, how he sits there, his gaze unmoved, at his table at the inn, hatching his plans for murder, necrophilia, and sodomy, le visage blême, serrant dans la main gauche la fiole avec le poison [50]—the palefaced killer!”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Tostes, who slaved away in Yonville”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“In the grave of unconscious memory, the one and only great love, Elisa Foucault-Schlésinger, around nine years his elder, whom Gustave met in Trouville, too young to be in passion’s thrall; Elisa, whom he loved as he loved no other woman in his life, save for his mother, who always hovered as a kindly but stern shadow over the house in Croisset.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Metaphysical angst is a concern of the highest standing, and those who have always known who and what they are, and why, and that they will always be permitted to continue being who and what they are may continue to address it. That it is their preserve is not what makes me feel wretched when I compare myself to them.”
― Jean Améry, Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left

“çünkü bizler Üçüncü Reich'ın zindanlarında ve kamplarındaki aczimiz ve had safhadaki düşkünlüğümüz nedeniyle acımadan çok aşağılanma gördük. Kendine acımaya karşı kazandığımız bağışıklık kadar, özyıkımın ayartıcı çağrısı da içimizdeki varlığını korudu. Biz gözyaşlarına
inanmayız.”
― Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

“awareness of the fact that I am a catastrophe Jew is not an ideological construct. It”
― Jean Améry, Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left

“İşkence, bir insanın içinde saklayabileceği en dehşet verici olaydır.”
― Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

“So Gustave Flaubert was playing as he composed Madame Bovary, groaning under the crushing weight of words; and the game plays out further in these pages, albeit according to a different set of rules. Charles Bovary, the poor man from whom everything was stripped away, love, his beloved, his possessions, and even his memory—for, as he is forced to realize, he has lived in error—was treated by Gustave Flaubert as a quantité négligeable.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“And I didn’t take it hard, at least young Léon would have been an understanding schoolmate, devoted and ready to serve, nothing like the haughty, highborn Gustave.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Zira kamptaki her tutuklu, en nihayetinde -az ya da çok- kendi bedeninin direnme gücüne dayanan bir yasanın hükmü altındaydı. Her halükarda açlık ve bitkinlikten ölmenin eşiğine gelmiş olan öznenin sadece düşünselliğini yitirmekle kalmadığı, tersine kelimenin gerçek anlamıyla insanlıktan çıktığı bir noktada, düşünselliğin etkisine ilişkin hiçbir soru sorulamayacağı açıktır.”
― Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

“The poor man, pity him. Or was it: the pathetic loser, and was the red that rose into her cheeks a sign not of compassion, but of contempt?”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“for Charles was dumb and the bourgeois author eclectic and erudite, and he hated stupidity (or what he took to be such) with the same hatred he harbored for that sin which he, a bourgeois through and through, would not forgive even Emma, his beloved, his transformed”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Born poor, little earned besides, brought up dumb, little learned besides. Your penknife, Gustave Flaubert, and oui and merci, all too mean and too meager.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“Your penknife, Flaubert.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“I couldn’t let her wither from boredom, or seek shelter in the Abbé’s confessional: I had to be her refuge, her pride, and I knew she would repay me for it, with the shimmering riches of her love.”
― Jean Améry, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man

“is with considerable unease that I read the following definition of what characterizes a Jew in the study of a very young Dutch Jew: “A Jew can be described as somebody who is more anxious, distrustful and irritable than his fellow citizen who has never been persecuted.” This seemingly valid definition is rendered erroneous by the fact that its author has left out an indispensable addendum, which should read, “. . . because he has good reason to assume that a new catastrophe could occur any time.” The awareness of yesterday’s cataclysm and the legitimate anticipation of its possible future recurrence constitute the ultimate vanishing point.”
― Jean Améry, Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left

“Ktoś raz torturowany, na zawsze pozostaje torturowanym.”
― Jean Améry

“it is not I who was, or is, disturbed. It is in fact the historical development that is neurotic. It is the others who are mad, and I stand among them, perplexed, like somebody who is entirely sane and, having joined a guided tour through a psychiatric clinic, has suddenly become separated from the psychiatrists and minders. And yet, the verdict handed down by the insane could be executed at any time; I have absolutely no recourse against it, and my own clarity of mind is entirely irrelevant.”
― Jean Améry, Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left