Imre Kertész Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

"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
Only from our stories can we discover that our stories have come to an end, otherwise we would go on living as if there were still something for us to continue (our stories, for example); that is, we would go on living in error.

Imre Kertész
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
Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species. We are all survivors, that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz.

Imre Kertész
That evening he talked about Leonardo and Michelangelo. It is impossible to place them in the human world, he said. It is impossible to comprehend how anything that attests to greatness has survived; it is obviously a result of innumerable chance events and of human incomprehension, he said. If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago. Fortunately, people have lost their flair for greatness and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to point of greatness, he said.

Imre Kertész
I am still here, although I don't know why; accidentally, I guess, as I was born; I am as much or as little accomplice to my staying alive as I was to my birth.

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

Imre Kertész
Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience;

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.

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.

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
But 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. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider's thread that holds our lives together.

Imre Kertész
The world is not our imagination but our nightmare, full of inconceivable surprises.

Imre Kertész
To live and to write, it's all the same, both together, for the pen is my spade; when I look ahead I only look back, when I stare at the paper I only see the past: she crossed that bluish green carpet as if she were crossing the sea because she wanted to talk to me, for she found out that I was "B.", author and literary translator, one of whose "works" had read, and which she definitely wanted to discuss with me, she said, and we talked and talked until we talked ourselves into bed — Good God! — and continued to talk even then, uninterrupted.

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

Imre Kertész
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.

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
For me this is a fact, writing is necessity, I don't know why, but it seems it was the only solution offered to me, even if it doesn't solve anything; still it doesn't leave me…

Imre Kertész
What we usually mean by fate is what we least understand, that is to say, ourselves, that subversive, unknown individual constantly plotting against us, whom, estranged and alienated but still bowing with disgust before his might, we call, for the of simplicity, fate.

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
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.

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.

Imre Kertész
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.

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…

Imre Kertész
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.

Imre Kertész
For Kingbitter the Hamlet question did not run To be or not to be? but Am I or am I not?.

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

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;

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

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

Imre Kertész