Imre Kertész quotes

Imre Kertész was a Hungarian novelist and Holocaust survivor, best known for his novel "Fatelessness." His work explores themes of identity, fate, and the impact of totalitarian regimes. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature and became an important voice in postwar European literature. Here are 64 of his quotes:

Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long. (Imre Kertész)
Talking is not enough; words don't clarify anything. I'll have to hit upon something, but what? View quote
Imre Kertész
There's just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that's a police revolution. View quote
Imre Kertész
Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot. View quote
Imre Kertész
I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. View quote
Imre Kertész
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. View quote
Imre Kertész
For Kingbitter the Hamlet question did not run "To be or not to be?” but "Am I or am I not?”. View quote
Imre Kertész
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. View quote
Imre Kertész
If one takes the path of success, then one ends up either successful or unsuccessful, there is no third alternative. View quote
Imre Kertész
If you're a revolutionary, you shouldn't have started a family. View quote
Imre Kertész
Writers complete their works, whether those be thousands of pages long or just a few laconic lines. (Imre Kertész)
Man is always a little at fault, that's all. View quote
Imre Kertész
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. View quote
Imre Kertész
Nothing upsets me as much as a shop window jammed full of objects; such windows literally depress, sadden, even demoralize me. View quote
Imre Kertész
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. View quote
Imre Kertész
Boredom. He takes it with him everywhere, like an angry shaggy terrier that he sets on others from time to time. View quote
Imre Kertész
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? View quote
Imre Kertész
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. View quote
Imre Kertész
How can we do justice even when it concerns truth itself, since for me only one truth exists, my truth, even if it is a delusion, yes, my delusion; my delusion. View quote
Imre Kertész
Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate. View quote
Imre Kertész
Auschwitz, I told her, appears to me in the image of a father; yes, the two terms, Auschwitz, and father, resonate the same echoes in me, and if the observation is that God is an exalted father, then God, too is revealed to me in the image of Auschwitz. (Imre Kertész)
Anyone who wants something else is Jewish. View quote
Imre Kertész
I live and occasionally I look up at the glorious air or the clouds into which I keep digging my grave with my pen, diligently, like a forced laborer, whom they order every day to dig deeper with his spade... View quote
Imre Kertész
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. View quote
Imre Kertész
"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. View quote
Imre Kertész