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

— Imre Kertész Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

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Imagination

More quotes by Imre Kertész

Talking is not enough; words don’t clarify anything. I’ll have to hit upon something, but what?

Detective Story (2008)

On the other hand, what is really irrational and what truly cannot be explained is not evil but, contrarily, the good.

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago.

Liquidation (2003)

I exist. Is this a life still? No, just vegetating. It seems that only one philosophy can succeed the philosophy of existentialism: nonexistentialism, the philosophy of nonexistent existence.

Detective Story (2008)

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

Detective Story (2008)

All Imre Kertész quotes →

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Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.

L. Frank Baum Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

Alan Moore

An active imagination may find a bad tendency arising out of every transaction between imperfect morals.

Edward Hall Alderson Brownlow v. Egerton (1854)

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Imre Kertész (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.