Imre Kertész Zitate

seite 2

„…, daß jenseits des Anekdotischen jede Geschichte und jedermanns Geschichte vom wesentlichen her gesehen gleichartig sei, und daß diese im wesentlichen gleichartigen Geschichten im wesentlichen tatsächlich alle Schreckensgeschichten seien, daß im wesentlichen alles Geschehen tatsächlich schrecklich sei und daß, im wesentlichen, auch die Geschichte schon seit langem nichts als höchstens eine Schreckensgeschichte sei.“

“Man is always a little at fault, that’s all.”

“He liked the style, that wry gallows humor armed with the semblance of omniscience; a most serviceable style it was, the dialect of the initiated, protecting them from their disillusionments, their fears, their well-concealed childish hopes.”

“Nothing upsets me as much as a shop window jammed full of objects; such windows literally depress, sadden, even demoralize me.”

“I had gotten into the habit of sleeping late because I had started to see that this was the only sensible way I could kill time.”

“Boredom. He takes it with him everywhere, like an angry shaggy terrier that he sets on others from time to time.”

“Cognitively we don’t know and will never discover what occasions the cause of our existence, we don’t know the purpose of our existence and we don’t know why we have to disappear from here once we have been placed here, I don’t know, why I have to live this fragmentary existence, which happened to be my lot, instead of a life that perhaps does exist somewhere. Why did I get this lot? This sex, this body, this awareness, this geographic setting, this fate, this language, this history, this rented room?”

“Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot.”

“"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).”

“"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."”

“"Auschwitz cannot be explained." And yet, it doesn’t take a Wittgenstein to notice that the sentence is faulty even from the point of pure linguistic logic;”

“Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.”

“I took a stroll in the city. It was infernally hot. The usual evening hubbub around me. Lovers on the pavements, hurrying to cinemas and other places of amusement as if nothing had happened, nothing. Living their nonexistent lives. Or do they exit, and it’s me who doesn’t.”

“Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience;”

“Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life.”

“Let us call our man, the hero of this story, Kingbitter. We imagine a man, and a name to go with him. Or conversely, let us imagine the name, and the man to go with it.”

“I do what I have to do, although I don’t know why I have to.”

“At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn’t know why.”

“I stayed alive therefore I am.”

“Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.”

“You just sit here 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.”

“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.”

“The world is not our imagination but our nightmare, full of inconceivable surprises.”

“My body is foreign to me that body that sustains me and will, ultimately, kill me.”

“The sentence "Auschwitz cannot be explained" is faulty simply from a formal point of view, for anything that is has an explanation, even if by necessity a merely self-serving faulty, so so explanation.”

“On the other hand, what is really irrational and what truly cannot be explained is not evil but, contrarily, the good.”

“By way of that wretched sentence "Auschwitz cannot be explained" is the wretched author explaining that we should be silent concerning Auschwitz, that Auschwitz doesn’t exist, or, rather, that it didn’t, for the only facts that cannot be explained are those that don’t or didn’t exist.”

“There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution.”

“True, he had been living a lively interior life today: he had dreamed something, he had awoken with an erection, and while shaving he had been dogged by a feeling that today he needed to decide, though he could not see clearly what it was he needed to decide, besides which he was all too aware of his own inability to make any decisions.
Despite that, the thought did cross Kingbitter's mind that he ought to do something about finding a theater to do the play, the comedy (or tragedy?) "Liquidation."
He was now in the ninth year of considering that.
Indeed, Kingbitter was now in the ninth year of considering whether he was handling the literary estate with due diligence.”

“Everyone here makes a botch of his life. That's the local specialty, the genius loci. Anyone who doesn't botch up his life here simply has no talent.”