Summer House with Swimming Pool Quotes

“There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about the house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it's still vacant.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy artillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn’t go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“A look says more than words alone. That's a cliche, of course. But a cliche, also says more than words alone.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“During a working day, there’s nothing I look forward to more than an evening of nothing at all. A meal. A beer or a glass of wine. The evening news on TV. A B movie or a soccer match. A working day like that gets off on the right foot. It’s a day with promise.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Suicide is a realistic option, I hear myself saying a minute later. Some people take comfort in the realization that they have control over the way their life ends. What they dread most of all is the implementation. The way in which. A train is so violent. Cutting your wrists in the bathtub is so bloody. Hanging is painful—it takes a long time before death comes. Sleeping pills may be vomited up. But there are substances that bring about a painless, easy death.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“His voice, which always carried right across the lawn. A voice like a foghorn. A voice that tankers and container vessels might use to find their bearings in distant estuaries and foreign ports.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Flippancy. A laughing matter. It’s like with funerals. They are, first and foremost, expected to be fun. There is laughter and drinking and bad language. To keep the whole thing from being too bourgeois. A bourgeois funeral is an artist’s worst nightmare.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Biology is a force to be reckoned with. An ugly child you love with all your heart and soul, you. But it's different. You're pleased with your third-floor walk-up, also, until someone invites you I've to dinner at a house with a pool in the garden.”
― Herman koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Life as a widow, she thinks, will always be like this. The friends will go on proposing toasts for months (for years!). To her. To their new center of attention. What she doesn't know yet is that, after a few courtesy calls, it will all be over. The silence that will follow is the same silence that always falls after a life in the shadows.”
― Herman koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“There have been cases of people who have gone through something horrible, but repressed it so thoroughly that they were able to lead a normal life.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Dinosaurs are not curious about who roamed the earth before they did. They live in the present. That’s something we might do well to learn from the dinosaurs.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“And then it happened. It was a detail, no more than that. A detail to which you pay no attention at first. That takes on meaning only later. In retrospect.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“During a working day, there’s nothing I look forward to more than an evening of nothing at all. A meal. A beer or a glass of wine. The evening news on TV. A B movie or a soccer match. A working day like that gets off on the right foot. It’s a day with promise. With perspective, I should say. A countryside of hills rolling on and on, and in the distance the glimmer of the sea.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“At Kayenta we were told that the entire Navajo Indian reservation was dry; you couldn't get a drop of alcohol anywhere. Not with dinner,but also not at the supermarket. "It's like Iran," Caroline said, taking a sip of her Coke. "But right in the middle of America.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“It also has to do with my profession. In my profession, true relaxation is a necessity.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Er was een dokter in de zaal.”
― Herman Koch, Zomerhuis met zwembad

“有些夫妻，对他们而言，不断地口角其实是他们婚姻的发动机，每一次的争吵都可以是一场前戏，随后在床上他们又会相互宽慰、和好如初。”
― 荷曼·柯赫, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“These days we can calculate how many times a woman can give birth before she is worn out. The answer is: twenty.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Nine percent of the population is homosexual, nine percent is left-handed.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“I looked at her face. Besides being covered in tears, it was above all marked by dissatisfaction. Deep-lying dissatisfaction, the kind a person is born with. Nothing helps to drive out that dissatisfaction. Expensive espresso machines, attention, a new wing on the house— for a fleeting moment the dissatisfaction disappears into the background, but it's like a leak coming through the wallpaper: You can cover it with new wallpaper, but after a while the brown spots soak through, anyway. There's not much you can do about it. You can muffle it for a bit with medication, with what they call “mother’s little helpers,” but in the end it only comes back with renewed strength.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“The latest they’re allowed to get home after a school party is a lot earlier than it is with boys. Between school and home lies a warren of darkened cycle paths.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“There’s not much you can do about it. You can muffle it for a bit with medication, with what they call “mother’s little helpers,” but in the end it only comes back with renewed strength.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Sometimes you run your life back to see at what point it could have taken a different turn.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“A grown-up man who falls down hard is laughable. A man who can laugh about it himself is that much less so.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“A bourgeois funeral is an artist’s worst nightmare.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Shit stinks. The stench serves as a warning to us not to eat our own feces.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“Some people need a kick in the ass, others just need to think less for a couple of hours.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool

“An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off. A day to deal with the worst of the garbage.”
― Herman Koch, Summer House with Swimming Pool