20 quotes
If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago.
Liquidation (2003)
Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.
Liquidation (2003)
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.
Liquidation (2003)
Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.
Liquidation (2003)
Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.
Liquidation (2003)
Maybe I'm worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed.
Liquidation (2003)
Writers complete their works, whether those be thousands of pages long or just a few laconic lines.
Liquidation (2003)
If you’re a revolutionary, you shouldn’t have started a family.
Liquidation (2003)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Liquidation (2003)
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.
Liquidation (2003)
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.
Liquidation (2003)
The state is always the same. The only reason it financed literature up till now was in order to liquidate it. Giving state support to literature is the state's sneaky way for the state liquidation of literature.
Liquidation (2003)