"Then I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining." -Beckett, Molloy

"Reality had become a problematic concept for Kingbitter, but, more serious still, a problematic state."

"But he's radically bored; that's the only radicalism he has left now."

"But then, everything and everyone is ceasing to exist in its present form."

"His story had reached an end, but he himself was stil here, posing a problem for which he more and more put off finding solution...solutions were all he could see, rather than lives."

"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."

"All of a sudden- wonder of wonders- the resistance ceased, and the suddenly found themselves in a void that, in their initial dazed state, they imagined to be freedom."

"Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate. On the other hand, he lives with an awareness of tragic fate."

"To wrestle with unvarnished matter, objective reality, the entire phenomenological world, in order to reach the essence that glimmers behind it- that is, if any such thing exists, of course. In most cases, one sets off from the premise that it does exist, because one is unable to reconcile oneself to the inessentiality of one's life."


"It happened, yet it's still not true. An exception, an anecdote."

"In the world as it presented itself to me, effects did not always derive from causes, nor did causes always prove adequately grounded points of departure...the world as it presented itself to me had no logic."

"The capacity to endow my life with a notion of sense simply deserted me."

"Anyone who has not lived in a world of undiscoverable reasons,; who has never woken up with the very taste of that disgust in his mouth; who has never felt that contagion of general powerlessness spreading throughout his body and gaining mastery over him- that person will not understand what I am talking about."

"I had not been guided by either conviction or hope but purely by a wish- how shall I put it?- to break th e monotony of the daily grind, to acquire some news of my own existence."

"You shouldn't allow yourself to know who you are...We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disaster, so there is a need for a particular art of living for us to survive. Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character...chaos becomes home to him. For him there can be no return to some center of the Self, a solid and irrefutable self-certainty; in other words, he is lost, in the most authentic sense of the word."

"The great insubordination is/for us to live our lives to the end/and equally the big humiliation/that we owe ourselves/The sole method of suicide that is worthy/of respect is to live/and to commit suicide amounts/to continuing life/starting anew everyday/living anew everyday/dying anew everyday."

"I felt sorr for our lives, the now meaningless, untellable lives that were strewn about there."

"The story devastated me, because it was the story of my onetime friend, and moreover it patently revealed what a life built on groundless hopes could lead to."

"There was no sense in any of it; I have not managed to bring anything into existence; the sole product of my life is that I have been able to gain acquaintance with the sense of strangeness that separates me from life."

"All one had to do was recognize, and that recognition was my life."

"I ought now to live like an adult, like a man. But I have no inclination for that."

"How could I depart from reality, totally incomprehensible and unknowable as it is, through being eternally shielded from us by our imaginations, thank God!"

"All at once, I grasped the absurdity of our situation; the fact that our story, live every story, was incomprehensible an irrevocable, had gone, slipped by, been engulfed, and we no longer had anything to do with it, just as we have hardly anything to do with our lives. It entered my head that only writing can restore this process, the unbrokenness of our lives."

"He was fed up with having to seek out new prisons for himself."

"It is not permissible to want anything."

"Writers sometimes 'cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair,' you said, in order to master it and move on."

"A person's true means of expression, however, he was always saying, is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all."

"The depths to which a person can sink...Low, right down to the Auschwitz howizon; to the point where a person loses her bearings, her will, abandons her goals, loses herself."

"He sought to apprehend Auschwitz in his own life, in his daily life, in the way he lived."

“You are probably right, Bee, that the world is a world of murderers, I told him, but all the same I don’t wish to see the world as a world of murderers; I wish to see the world as a world in which it is possible to live.” (Are we entitled to make this choice? Which are we obligated to choose?)

“Shameful to live. Love me…that’s our only chance.”

“’The play’s raison d’être,’ the note ran, ‘is a novel. Its reality is thus another work. On top of that, we have no knowledge of this other work, the novel, in its entirety, any more than we do of the Creation. It is thus just as baffling as the world that is given to us, which we refer to under its alternate name of reality. Just as fragmentary, yet jus as intelligible, for after all, we live in accordance with the logic of the world that is given to us.”

“Am I or am I not?”

from Liquidation, by Imre Kertész