Antal Szerb > Quotes

“In London November isn't a month, it's a state of mind.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“And while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen...”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Everyone has to find his own way to die.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you're just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“For love, there has to be a distance across which lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That's why the church won't allow eunuchs to become priests.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“I really dislike the sort of people who aren't like other people. It's true other people are so boring. But so are the ones who aren't like them.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Szomoruak vagyunk tizenhat eves korunk szomorusagaval, szerelmeink megtort vonala grafikonszeruen elottunk van, ovatosan orulunk a holnapoknak, nagyon tavoli medvek borere iszunk, es tiz kilometer korzetben meghallunk minden zajt.”
― Antal Szerb, A Pendragon legenda

“Ez így van; az ember mániákusan, veszendően, a pokol és halál határán vágyódik valaki után, keresi, kergeti, hiába és élete elsorvad a nosztalgiában. Amióta Rómában volt, állandóan ezt a pillanatot várta, erre készült, és már-már azt hitte, hogy sosem fog Évával beszélni. És azután egyszerre megjelenik, és akkor az ember olcsó pizsamáját a mellén összeszorítja, szégyelli, hogy kócos, borotválatlan, mérhetetlenül szégyelli lakását, és legjobb szeretné, ha nem lenne ott az, aki után kimondhatatlanul vágyódott.”
― Antal Szerb, Utas És Holdvilág

“The matter could in fact have been resolved quite simply if all those round the table had been equally intelligent. But in this life that is rarely given.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“The stronger civilization becomes, the more deeply the love of death is buried in the subconscious.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“We were so intimate that it wasn't possible to flirt or fall in love with one another. For love, there has to be a distance across which the lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course an illusion, because love in fact separate people. Love is a polarity. Two lovers are the two oppositely charged poles of the universe.”
― Antal Szerb

“You have no illness," said the doctor, "just some sort of extreme exhaustion. What did you do to tire yourself out so much?"
"I?" asked Mihaly thoughtfully. "Nothing. I lived.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“If someone wants to give you money, whatever the source, you should take it. Every religious-historical authority agrees about that.”
― Antal Szerb

“The nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Részvétet éreztem az ismeretlen sportember iránt, és egyúttal kárörömet is. Úgy kell neki, miért sportember, de ha már sportember, mit keres minálunk. Valószínűleg ő is így érzett volna irányomban, ha a golfpályán látott volna meg engem.”
― Antal Szerb, The Pendragon Legend

“Tell me,' he asked, with some embarassment, as we strolled along: 'you're a bloody German, aren't you?'
'Oh, no. I'm Hungarian.'
'Hungarian?'
'Hungarian.'
'What's that? Is that a country? Or you are just having me on?
'Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.'
'And where do you Hungarians live?'
'In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia'.
'Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.”
― Antal Szerb, The Pendragon Legend

“These peoples probably feared death even more than we do. Our civilisation presents us with a marvellous mental machinery designed to help us forget, for most of our lives, that one day we too will die. In time we manage to push death out of our consciousness, just as we have done with the existence of God. That's what civilisation does. But for these archaic peoples nothing was more immediately apparent than death and the dead, I mean actual dead people, whose mysterious para-existence, fate, and vengeful fury constantly preoccupied them. They had a tremendous horror of death and the dead. But then of course in their minds everything was more ambiguous than it is for us. Opposites sat much closer. The fear of death and the desire for death were intimately juxtaposed in their minds, and the fear was often a form of desire, the desire a form of fear.”
― Antal Szerb

“Az öreg elkísért a falu végéig, ott azután megmutatta az utat, és megmagyarázta, hogy merre kell mennem. Már akkor nem tetszett nekem a dolog. Mr. Mansfield magyarázatának a lényege az volt, hogy időnként egy bükkfaerdőn kellett keresztülmennem, amit egy nyírfaerdő váltott fel, és egy tölgyfaerdő is nagy szerepet játszott. De én, sajnos, kora ifjúságomtól kezdve városlakó voltam, és a szellemtudományok kizárólagos híve. Sose tudtam két fát megkülönböztetni egymástól.”
― Antal Szerb, The Pendragon Legend

“I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you'll forgive my saying so, you will always to some extent a mere newcomer in my life.

When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I've never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets - or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.

But best of all I loved the Castle Hill District of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen's wife buried in the high tower of Deva.”
― Antal Szerb

“It is not the business of a Queen to be human.”
― Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace

“And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“If an aristocrat became bankrupt he looked to the sunshine of royal providence [...] but when the nobility sank too low to qualify for royal notice, they became fraudsters, trading on the display of rank: the man would become a card-sharper or gigolo, while the woman sold herself. Actual work would have been unthinkable. It would have offended against the ancient order of things, which assigned that role to the middle classes and the peasantry. This concept is difficult to connect with our modern view of the world, but its very absurdity follows directly from the fact that everything in its old order was so firm and wonderful - with everything in its eternally appointed place and moving in fixed circles like the stars. There was no changing your lot in life at will: it was assigned to you forever, by birth. If you fell below your appointed station, you couldn't just swap it for another - you simply plummeted into the void.”
― Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace

“as long as we keep moving, we don’t notice how tired we are, but only when we sit down.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“O amor exige uma distância, que os amantes percorrem para se encontrar. Naturalmente, a proximidade é ilusória, porque o amor na realidade afasta.”
― Antal Szerb

“All of a sudden, a deadly longing seized him, a longing such as he'd only known when very young, but this was a more reflected, burning longing: for he was longing for the longing he'd known in youth, so sharply that he had to shout.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight