Quotes from Arnošt Lustig

Life is not what we want but what we have.

It occurred to me that his words had a shadow. Or teeth and claws, and blood. Some kind of invisible whip. How words can be a trap, a trick and a net, not for butterflies or birds, or lions! The things that words promise.

The day after tomorrow you'll say that only the day before you saw someone who no longer exists. He stays in your memory for a split second and then vanishes.

When you abandon everything you can believe in, you're abandoning yourself. As if you've never existed. But that takes a long time. If you're no longer in control of your own life, can you at least be in control of its end?

To be here or somewhere else, to live or not to live, to look out through a broken window or not to look.

She stared ahead with eyes where dreams no longer swam, where thoughts no longer had any life. It was that hazy stare of old people behind which was the mysterious nothingness which was drawing nearer, the absolute end, the annihilation of everything and everybody, the awful end in helplessness, grief, grief, and the sleep of everything there is.

Time reminds everybody of death, but who goes around day and night talking about it? Was this the source of that strange anxiety which sometimes comes over us, without our knowing why? Like some strange sister of joy, it was a tremor of fear, of ending, of all that begins and passes away. Was this the source of that odd loneliness we feel even when we aren't alone. and which is akin to stardust?

To look good in defeat is the ultimate a person can want.

There are some things we run after and it turns out that we run in vain. Then there are things we don't pursue, and those are the things that escape us.

To kill and caress. Or simply kill, so you're not always bothered by something or somebody. So it is to be killed or to kill.

Hunger and cold were like two walls with no room for anything else in between but loneliness, in which a man is a stranger even to himself.

There was some need, some attraction that drew him closer to the German boy whose life he'd save, just to lose his own. But it was life that connected them, because it was death at the same time. It couldn't be put into words, it was intangible, but it was as complete as everything in life is; it was what connected birds and people or a grain of dust and the stars. It was strong because it was so weak and weak because it was so strong.

The hope killed them," said the old man. "It killed the very best of them. And hopelessness straightened out the very best of us.

We lived a decent and beautiful life," the old man said. "Maybe it's our innocence that irritates those who hate us so much and makes them kill us and burn us and hang us. It was a magnificent life because we lived in peace with ourselves. But we were always in the minority.

It was more than knowing or not knowing, beside stillness and shouts, memory and images of the future.

Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.

Some people know they'll live until spring and that's all they need to be happy. When I was feeling good, I just let the sun go down, knowing I'd see it again next morning. When I felt worse, and it didn't matter for what reasons, every sunset seemed to me like the end of the world. Maybe it's true, that the world dies every day at evening and is born again in the morning. But not always for everybody.