Imre Kertész Quotes

1929–2016 Hungary

Imre Kertész (9 November 1929 - 31 March 2016) is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.

Hungary
Academics
Nobel laureates
Novelists

Also known as: Imre kertesz

Random Imre Kertész quote

51 quotes

If you’re a revolutionary, you shouldn’t have started a family.

Liquidation (2003)

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

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Liquidation (2003)

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.

Liquidation (2003)

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

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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.

Liquidation (2003)

One's religious duty, totally independent of the crippling religions of crippling churches, is . . . understanding the world.

The régime was overthrown, and I'm not going to pretend it was me who overthrew it.

Liquidation (2003)

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

Liquidation (2003)

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.

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

"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).

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life.

Detective Story (2008)

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

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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.

Liquidation (2003)

Kingbitter undoubtedly could see solutions to hand, both better ones and worse; indeed, if he reflected more deeply, solutions were all he could see, rather than lives.

Liquidation (2003)

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.

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

It only has to be accepted temporarily — temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die.

Detective Story (2008)

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.

Liquidation (2003)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Imre Kertész (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.