Parallel Stories Quotes

“By fantasizing one builds a more predictable world, and then one has no time to notice what is really happening, because of the din made by one's expectations crashing down.”
― Peter Nadas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Hardly anything remained of which he could speak aloud.”
― Peter Nadas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“In the most significant moments of life, one’s mind is busy with completely inessential, insignificant things.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Every cock differs from every other cock the way men do from one another, though each cock is always surprisingly different from the man it belongs to.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“If only because of his son’s terrible death, he could not have Creation allowing atheists and Communists to be right and materialism to enjoy such primacy. He could not believe there was no hereafter, that there would be no final judgment, that there was no kind of mercy.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Gyöngyvér was living proof that the Hungarian government, in accordance with an agreement, wanted the Eichmann papers delivered to the court in Jerusalem. Her confession was calculated into the game. The disappearance of the embassy’s chief counselor on the way to his post was duly recorded, and this official record included the missing person’s overcoat and briefcase.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“I also tended to avoid her because I could not imagine the moment when she’d give up the playacting, take me back, and press me to herself for the first time. I was scared that I might push her away because she had become repugnant, because she had left me, and because I really hated her. Of course I suspected that this woman, whom I sometimes imagined was my mother, was among those who were crushed when the marquee of the Duna Cinema crashed down. Probably not one of those whom the rescuers scraped out alive from under the rubble after the dust settled and everyone was sobbing, fleeing, helping, or only helplessly screaming and watching the incredible. That would mean I’d lost my mother for the second time. Later some good people carried the corpses to the corner of Antal Nagy Street in Buda, and then, at the cost of subdued altercations on top of the rubble, the line for bread re-formed itself.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Both he and Mária Szapáry found some gratification in the half hour or forty minutes they spent sitting together in the noisy corridor; being close in a time of trouble and in the most profound feeling of being in the same situation because they loved the same being. For without hesitation they would, for Elisa, have strangled or murdered with a pistol, hunting rifle, anything, a knife or their bare hands. And their peculiar solidarity was enriched by their being a man and a woman, proportionately entwined with Elisa’s life.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Life was worth living after all, because there was such a thing as revenge, and God has given us murder as our freedom.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Fate had taken its revenge on the women; their fucking fate screwed them but good.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“By the way, my name is Bellardi, he added, to end the embarrassing misunderstanding between them. And as if moved by this mention of his own historic name, he gently combined the two names. My son is László Bellardi, and of course that’s my name too.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“At this moment, she did not understand why she’d been attracted all her life more to the beauty of men. What Geerte’s lips had done to her and what she had done to Geerte was something no other sensual experience could even approach. The reality of her memory touched the reality of the sight before her.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“She was a ruthless mother, not even worthy to be called a mother, but I never believed this, no matter who said it. In classiness and strictness, she resembled my piano teacher. People also said to me, little boy, don’t even think about her, it’s not worth it. She was living in austere grandeur with someone, somewhere in a distant and alluring strange land. They said this was a moral slough. Which made me think of a puddle with pigs wallowing in it, snorting with pleasure. At other times, I imagined classiness as something like the dignity with which my piano teacher endured her lameness; she never complained. Or as the threatening act of destiny that will reach me too with its fury and one fine day strike me down.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Karla was weak; one morning, before going to the Auenberg estate, the baby unexpectedly fell silent after protracted screaming. It would have been good if he’d stopped breathing. Karla had the impression that the baby accepted his death.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“The Führer is the first statesman in the history of the world who not only acknowledges and understands the achievements of research in racial purity and genetics, but has raised them to be the guiding principle in the administration of justice. For him, nothing is more important than a healthy nation.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“We consider our primary task to be not the curing of the individual but genetic prevention, he explained, the treatment of the nation’s body, which means filtering out and annihilating the sick or flawed inherited stock, because we are working for the benefit of a healthy and racially pure genetic stock. It is for this purpose that we have established our network of race-nurturing physicians. One can only regret that the Hungarians cannot come along with us in this great work. For the first time, we have raised the latest racial-biological findings to the level of state interest, and you will believe me, Countess, when I say that this is an unshakable edifice.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Let this remain a minor novel that no one has ever written and no one ever will write.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Her life was here with her, along with all her earlier lives and the memories of her earliest life. A life she had spent within strange walls, among strange odors and strange objects whose history she could not have known, or anyway whose remaining traces simply had no historical context for her.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“If one decides to build on illusions, it is not easy to break free of hypocrisy and the worship of decoration.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“or their confidence in the historical mission of the Hungarian people, but who feel great social responsibility for rural wretchedness and urban poverty, yet nevertheless adjust their professions’ rules and demands to the generally accepted and all-pervasive laws of the corrupt gentry.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Writhing under the enormous weight of its ongoing collapse, self-satisfied feudal Hungary drags itself from one economic crisis to another, lugging along the antiquated customs, traditions, and inexhaustible wounded pride of its failed aristocracy, which keeps an iron grip even on those who do not share their hope for prosperity in an illusionary greater Hungary”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“For five nights in a row, again and again, at different locations and in different positions he had offered me everything. Maybe his specialty was showing not only his prick but also his testicles, hair, belly, and top of his thighs. There was a certain merciless openness in this. The relief of his stomach, thighs, and loins, his head, and his entire splendid figure eerily reminded me of the man with anvil and hammer one can see on the twenty-forint bill. On each occasion, I had stupidly run away from him. To my shame, in the light of day I would take out the twenty-forint bill to see him and be with him. I couldn’t forget him. The only difference between him and his image on the bill was that on the latter the artist had used drapery to conceal the loins.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“To imagine that he would meet his total-stranger doppelganger, differing from him only proportionately. He couldn’t imagine this other person except as an exact likeness, which is why it couldn’t be a girl. But this person should be more perfect than he, rather like that giant from whom he’d been fleeing, but not so perfect as to humiliate him with physical and mental superiority.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“His sperm kept on seeping. His erection referred not to just anyone but precisely to that someone who might pop up at any moment, that someone whom everyone here idolized and worshipped, that someone whom he too was looking for but hadn’t yet found.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Hallways in Budapest apartments are usually pitifully shapeless. As though Hungarian architects had said, it makes no difference how you enter or what you find when you do.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel

“Filling up someone must feel very different from being filled up by someone, these feelings are not interchangeable; yet, halfway between the anus and the genitals, at the point where the powerful dual self-enclosed muscles meet and cross in a figure eight, the image men and women have of themselves do not differ.”
― Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories: A Novel