Imre Kertész - Time Quotes

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

Imre Kertész
The régime was overthrown, and I'm not going to pretend it was me who overthrew it. A general liquidation is in full swing, and I'm not going to join in. I've become a spectator. And I'm not even spectating from the front rows in the stalls but from somewhere up in the gods. Maybe I'm worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed. That would be the unseemlier alternative, because then they would have smashed my ear in for no reason at all. That is the assumption I'm inclining to these days. (He breaks off and ponders, book in hand.) I did time for no reason, dragged the millstone of a police record around for no reason, was on probation for years for no reason, and I'm no hero, I merely botched up my life.

Imre Kertész
He himself had said near enough exactly what was in the play. The only snag was that by the time that scene was played out in reality, almost word for word, the person who had written the play, and that scene in it, was no longer alive.
He had committed suicide.

Imre Kertész
"But there are times when being happy — just happy, nothing else — is simply vile."
"Why?" Jill inquired.
"Because," Enrique reasoned, "one can't be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy."

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.

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