Journey by Moonlight Quotes

“In London November isn't a month, it's a state of mind.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“And while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen...”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Everyone has to find his own way to die.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you're just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“For love, there has to be a distance across which lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That's why the church won't allow eunuchs to become priests.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“I really dislike the sort of people who aren't like other people. It's true other people are so boring. But so are the ones who aren't like them.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Ez így van; az ember mániákusan, veszendően, a pokol és halál határán vágyódik valaki után, keresi, kergeti, hiába és élete elsorvad a nosztalgiában. Amióta Rómában volt, állandóan ezt a pillanatot várta, erre készült, és már-már azt hitte, hogy sosem fog Évával beszélni. És azután egyszerre megjelenik, és akkor az ember olcsó pizsamáját a mellén összeszorítja, szégyelli, hogy kócos, borotválatlan, mérhetetlenül szégyelli lakását, és legjobb szeretné, ha nem lenne ott az, aki után kimondhatatlanul vágyódott.”
― Antal Szerb, Utas És Holdvilág

“The stronger civilization becomes, the more deeply the love of death is buried in the subconscious.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“The matter could in fact have been resolved quite simply if all those round the table had been equally intelligent. But in this life that is rarely given.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“You have no illness," said the doctor, "just some sort of extreme exhaustion. What did you do to tire yourself out so much?"
"I?" asked Mihaly thoughtfully. "Nothing. I lived.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“The nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“as long as we keep moving, we don’t notice how tired we are, but only when we sit down.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“He... how should I put it... he's a seeker... He's been seeking something his entire life, something that's different.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“I know what's wrong with me," he said to Ellesley. "I have acute nostalgia. I want to be young. Is there a cure for that?”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“All of a sudden, a deadly longing seized him, a longing such as he'd only known when very young, but this was a more reflected, burning longing: for he was longing for the longing he'd known in youth, so sharply that he had to shout.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“That’s how it is. You yearn for someone, maniacally, mortally, to the verges of hell and death. You look for them everywhere, pursue them, to no avail, and your life wastes away in nostalgia.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Later I read in a famous English essay that the chief characteristic of the Celts was rebellion against the tyranny of facts.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“Don’t talk rubbish, and don’t pretend you don’t understand me. I’m not talking about the death-wish of the weary and the sick, or potential suicides, but about people in the fullness of their life, people who in fact because their lives are so fulfilled yearn for death as for the greatest ecstasy, as in the common phrase, mortal passion. Either you understand this or you don’t. I can’t explain it. But for those ancient people it was self-evident.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“És ha az ember él, akkor még mindig történhetik valami.”
― Szerb Antal, Utas és holdvilág

“Ma minden a munka: a munka a jutalom az elinduló ifjúnak, tanulmányaiért, és a munka a vezeklés és büntetés is, azoknak, akiknek valami nem sikerült.”
― Szerb Antal, Utas és holdvilág

“- Semmi baja - mondta az orvos -, csak valami rettenetes kimerültség. Mit csinált maga, hogy ennyire elfáradt?
- Én? (...) Semmit. Éltem.”
― Szerb Antal, Utas és holdvilág

“I’m not very sure that a life of scholarship would be as satisfying for me as it is for you . . . I don’t have the enthusiasm . . . I can’t really believe in the importance of these things . .”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“His instincts told him that in Italy it was all very much the same whoever happened to be in power and whatever the ideas in whose name they ruled. Politics touched only the surface. The people, the vegetative sea of the Italian masses, bore the changing times on their back with astonishing passivity, and lived quite unconnected with their own remarkable history. He suspected that even Republican and Imperial Rome, with its huge gestures, its heroics and bestial stupidities, had been nothing more than a virile drama on the surface, the whole Roman Empire the mere private affair of a few brilliant actors, while down below the Italians placidly ate their pasta, sang songs of love, and begat their countless offspring.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“... he was filled with the happy feeling that he did not have to be where the important things happened, that he was somewhere entirely other, behind God’s back.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight