novelists-from-hungary

"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."

"Férfi sorsa a nő!"

"The lessons and tasks emerging from global conferences and from other areas of United Nations activity have a twofold nature. On the one hand, each of them, having its undisputed merits, appears to lend itself to universal collective action. On the other hand, taken in their totality, they require not only that we set our priorities but also a thorough efficiency probe and maybe a fuller use of the principle of subsidiarity as well."

"For a thousand years we have held the view that the fate and future of Hungary and Europe are indivisible. The key to the survival and development of the Hungarian people in the heart of the continent, in the Carpathian Basin, can only be inseparably bound to political and economic Europe."

"At this important juncture of history, our task is to develop and strengthen a genuinely worldwide constituency for the United Nations. We can do this only if we make every effort to involve the young generations, whose confidence must be won through a renewed philosophy of multilateral cooperation. I am confident that for generations to come the promotion and protection of multi-ethnicity, diversity, tolerance and respect for human dignity will be the major feature what is expected of the United Nations."

"The present level and quality of Hungary and American relations is the result of an ongoing process of development which has been driven by shared principles and goals, and the mutual benefit of practical cooperation. It is especially encouraging to see that our relations also extend to new areas and regions which represent preparation to face the challenges of the future."

"We live in a time of opportunities, and the United Nations is at a crossroads. Only a reformed United Nations can be a catalyst in our endeavours to create a safe and secure world, where freedom, democracy and respect for human rights flourish. We should redouble our efforts to revitalize the United Nations. To this effect, there can be no delay in restructuring and streamlining the costly bureaucracy of the United Nations system. We have to rationalize the work of the General Assembly. Enlargement of the Security Council, along with enhancement of its effectiveness, is more than necessary. Financial reform of the United Nations is a must."

"The time has come for a revitalized multilateral mentality to meet effectively and firmly the challenge of the new global and interconnected threats of resurgent nationalism and ethnic strife, international terrorism, illicit drug-trafficking, the smuggling of nuclear materials, the deliberate degradation of the global environment and poverty."

"Globalization, integration and interdependence can and should be important driving forces towards environmentally sound sustainable development. Regrettably, in our contemporary world we see only too often patterns of disintegration and the absence of the rule of law, accompanied by flagrant violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms. These constitute not only an affront to human dignity, but they have the adverse effect of hindering sustainable human development and most often bring about a fatal degradation of the environment as well."

"We have a shared responsibility to ensure that the worldwide and irreversible victory of freedom and democracy doesn't remain merely a scenario. We must work together so that the actors in the story of the 21st century are able to live in prosperity and integrity, at peace with themselves and each other. Hungary is a responsible and reliable partner of the United States in this."

"Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it."

"Far from securing order, terror intensifies disorder and social disintegration. Terror, the most extreme form of power, is the least effective, and rulers employ it to the detriment of their own authority."

"The world is full of people whom no one has put in chains but who bind themselves with frozen thoughts and fears. A man whose mind conforms to the conditioned responses of his daily life is a coward and a slave."

"People flock around the sorcerer, the priest, the scientist, the commissar, the psychiatrist, the drug pusher, each generation of the faithful pitying the victims of past fallacies, and this repetitive vanity keeps us stupider than we need to be."

"During all my wandering through two decades and two continents, I've found nothing more pathetic than the universal misery of young boys trying to charm young girls."

"Cultural History suggests that men have always had a greater inclination to close their eyes than to open them, to believe comforting lies rather than disconcerting truths."

"[...] our confidence in foretelling and influencing events increases in inverse ratio to our ability to do so. The farther we go from ourselves and from the present, the less we sense the probabilities, and it is easy for us to be "dead certain" about things we cannot possibly know anything about."

"There may not always be a way where there's a will, but on the other hand - if success isn't certain, neither is failure."

"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."

"Writers complete their works, whether those be thousands of pages long or just a few laconic lines."

"That evening he talked about Leonardo and Michelangelo. It is impossible to place them in the human world, he said. It is impossible to comprehend how anything that attests to greatness has survived; it is obviously a result of innumerable chance events and of human incomprehension, he said. If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago. Fortunately, people have lost their flair for greatness and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to point of greatness, he said."

"He liked the style, that wry gallows humor armed with the semblance of omniscience; a most serviceable style it was, the dialect of the initiated, protecting them from their disillusionments, their fears, their well-concealed childish hopes."

"He himself had said near enough exactly what was in the play. The only snag was that by the time that scene was played out in reality, almost word for word, the person who had written the play, and that scene in it, was no longer alive. He had committed suicide."

"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."

"The régime was overthrown, and I'm not going to pretend it was me who overthrew it. A general liquidation is in full swing, and I'm not going to join in. I've become a spectator. And I'm not even spectating from the front rows in the stalls but from somewhere up in the gods. Maybe I'm worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed. That would be the unseemlier alternative, because then they would have smashed my ear in for no reason at all. That is the assumption I'm inclining to these days. (He breaks off and ponders, book in hand.) I did time for no reason, dragged the millstone of a police record around for no reason, was on probation for years for no reason, and I'm no hero, I merely botched up my life."

"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."

"Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate."

"Only from our stories can we discover that our stories have come to an end, otherwise we would go on living as if there were still something for us to continue (our stories, for example); that is, we would go on living in error."

"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."

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

"Thereafter, the scenes had succeeded one another, turn and turn about, in the drama as in reality, to the point that, in the end, Kingbitter did not know what to admire more: the author's-his dead friend's-crystal-clear foresight or his own, so to say, remorseful determination to identify with his prescribed role and stick to the story. Nowadays, though, with the lapse of nine years, Kingbitter was interested in something else. His story had reached an end, but he himself was still here, posing a problem for which he more and more put off finding a solution. He would either have to carry on his story, which had proved impossible, or else start a new story, which had proved equally impossible. 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."

"True, he had been living a lively interior life today: he had dreamed something, he had awoken with an erection, and while shaving he had been dogged by a feeling that today he needed to decide, though he could not see clearly what it was he needed to decide, besides which he was all too aware of his own inability to make any decisions. Despite that, the thought did cross Kingbitter's mind that he ought to do something about finding a theater to do the play, the comedy (or tragedy?) "Liquidation." He was now in the ninth year of considering that. Indeed, Kingbitter was now in the ninth year of considering whether he was handling the literary estate with due diligence."

"Anyone who wants something else is Jewish."

"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."

"Auschwitz, I told her, appears to me in the image of a father; yes, the two terms, Auschwitz, and father, resonate the same echoes in me, and if the observation is that God is an exalted father, then God, too is revealed to me in the image of Auschwitz."

"For Kingbitter the Hamlet question did not run “To be or not to be?” but “Am I or am I not?”."

""No" — I could never be another person’s father, fate, god, "No" — it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz)."

"I am still here, although I don’t know why; accidentally, I guess, as I was born; I am as much or as little accomplice to my staying alive as I was to my birth."

"I do what I have to do, although I don’t know why I have to."

"I have felt that some sort of awful shame is attached to my name and that I have somehow brought this shame along from somewhere I have never been, and that I have carried this sin as my sin even though I have never committed it; this sin pursues me all my life, which life is undoubtedly not my own even thought I live it , I suffer from it die of it."

"Man is always a little at fault, that’s all."

"I stayed alive therefore I am."

"At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn’t know why."

"For me this is a fact, writing is necessity, I don’t know why, but it seems it was the only solution offered to me, even if it doesn’t solve anything; still it doesn't leave me…"

"What we usually mean by fate is what we least understand, that is to say, ourselves, that subversive, unknown individual constantly plotting against us, whom , estranged and alienated but still bowing with disgust before his might, we call, for the of simplicity, fate."

"To live and to write, it's all the same, both together, for the pen is my spade; when I look ahead I only look back, when I stare at the paper I only see the past: she crossed that bluish green carpet as if she were crossing the sea because she wanted to talk to me, for she found out that I was "B.", author and literary translator, one of whose "works" had read, and which she definitely wanted to discuss with me, she said, and we talked and talked until we talked ourselves into bed — Good God! — and continued to talk even then, uninterrupted."

""Auschwitz cannot be explained." And yet, it doesn’t take a Wittgenstein to notice that the sentence is faulty even from the point of pure linguistic logic;"

"I live and occasionally I look up at the glorious air or the clouds into which I keep digging my grave with my pen, diligently, like a forced laborer, whom they order every day to dig deeper with his spade…"

"The sentence "Auschwitz cannot be explained" is faulty simply from a formal point of view, for anything that is has an explanation, even if by necessity a merely self-serving faulty, so so explanation."

"How can we do justice even when it concerns truth itself, since for me only one truth exists, my truth, even if it is a delusion, yes, my delusion; my delusion."