Quotes from László Krasznahorkai

what one ought to capture in beauty is that which is treacherous and irresistible...

Get it into your thick head that jokes are just like life. Things that begin badly, end badly. Everything's fine in the middle, it's the end you need to worry about.

When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That's how it works.

There is an intense relationship between proximate objects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as for the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God.

The light gave him hope but he was afraid of it too.

I'm not interested to believe in something, but to understand the people who believe.

Only the land remained, the silent order of the mountains, the ground covered in fallen dead leaves in the enormous space, a boundless expanse - disguising, concealing, hiding, covering all that lies below the burning earth.

for it was the approaching dawn that held him in its spell, that 'promise kept each morning' that the earth, along with the town and his own person, would emerge from beneath the shadow of the night, and that the delicate glimmer of dawn would yield to the bright light of day...

Memory is the art of forgetting.

For minutes on end he could not tell whether he was really hearing howls of pain, or whether it was simply that his years of long, exhausting work had rendered him incapable of distinguishing between the general noise and ancient prehistoric screams that were somehow preserved in time ('the evidence of suffering does not disappear without a trace,' he hopefully remarked) and now were being raised by the rain, like dust.

What is behind me still remains ahead of me.

It's not that I don't understand why a person has to die, but rather, I don't understand why a person has to live, Baron Béla Wenckheim pondered

Bough of a tree to the rain . . ." he turns the phrase over in his mouth as if it were fine wine, trying to guess its vintage, realizing somewhat indifferently that it is beyond him.

It passes, but it does not pass away.

Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.

You have every cause for anxiety. We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society.

to pour out one's heart and not drink vodka at the same time, well, that is inconceivable for a Russian soul...

Should we die, the mechanics of life would go on without us, and that is what people feel most terribly disturbed by,' Korin interrupted himself, bowed his head, thought for a while, then pulled an agonized expression and started slowly swiveling his head, 'though it is only the very fact that it goes on that enables us properly to understand that there is no mechanism.

Faith, thought Eszter . . . is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate.

Europeans believe that culture is something they can grasp and touch because, for them, culture is comprised of objects, or remnants of objects, and this object, this remnant, conceals within it the essence of the original. For the Chinese, the matter is completely different---for them, the essence of culture can only be preserved in spiritual form.

It is not always necessary to search for the cause behind everything, because every cause is unfounded. A cause only looks like a cause from a certain viewpoint.

to be Hungarian is not to belong to a people, but instead it's an illness, an incurable, frightening disease, a misfortune of epidemic proportions that could overcome every single observer with nausea

az Å'rület egy homályban tartott kérdés, amelyre van válasz ugyan, csak olyan, amit egy néma mond egy süketnek.

He looked tired, exhausted even, but it was as if this were the specific thing that had exhausted him, not ordinary everyday matters but one single all-consuming care; it was obviously a fatigue born out of decades of vigilance, exhaustion owing to the knowledge that any moment he might be killed by that immeasurable weight of fat.