The World Goes On Quotes

“Memory is the art of forgetting.”
― László Krasznahorkai, Die Welt voran

“...I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me, because I've looked into what's coming, and I don't need anything from here.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“... to pour out one's heart and not drink vodka at the same time, well, that is inconceivable for a Russian soul...”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquility, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I've looked into what's coming, and I don't need anything from here.”
― László Krasznahorkai”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“Evil exists, and the good, sad to say, can never catch up with it.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“In vain would we talk about nature, nature doesn’t want this; it is no use to talk about the divine, the divine doesn’t want this, and anyway, no matter how much we want to, we are unable to talk about anything other than ourselves, because we are only capable of talking about history, about the human condition, about that never-changing quality whose essence carries such titillating relevance only for us; otherwise, from the viewpoint of that “divine otherwise,” this essence of ours is, actually, possibly of no consequence whatsoever, for ever and aye.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“. . . we hadn't even noticed when all this had been happening, the words "turning point" and "dawn of a new era" were hardly out of our mouths when precisely this critical, time-bound nature of a turning point and a dawn was rendered ludicrous as we realized that all of a sudden we were living in a new world, had entered a radically new era, and we understood none of it, because everything we had was obsolete, including our conditioned reflexes, our attempts to understand the nature of a process, how "all of this" had "consequently" proceeded from there to here, everything was as obsolete as our conviction to rely on experience, on sober rationality . . .”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“...good can never catch up with evil, because with the gap between good and evil there is no hope whatsoever.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“...there was Paradise, of which he was the only resident, while in the world, with humanity suspecting nothing, knowing nothing of this great situation, simply continuing on with life as normal, as if nothing in this heaven-sent world had happened with the Great Journey and the Great Discovery, the world just kept going on like before, and this is what Gagarin's nervous system couldn't bear, and this nervous system destroyed his organism too, in the last days he could no longer bear being alive, this became completely clear to me, he could bear it only with vodka...”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“The onset of catastrophe is not signaled by the sense of falling through the dark to an accidental death: everything, including a catastrophe, has a moment-by-moment structure - a structure that is beyond measurement or comprehension, one that is maddeningly complex or must be conceived in quite another manner, in which the degree of complexity can be articulated only in terms of images that seem impossible to conjure - visible only if time has slowed down to the point that we see the world as indifferent owing to the available circumstances and having doomed preconditions that arrive at a perfect universal conclusion, if only because they are composed of individual intentions - because the moment is the result of unconscious choices, because a key doesn't automatically fit into the ignition, because we do not start into third gear and move down to second but we start in second and move into third, rolling down the hill then turning onto a highway above the village, because the distance before us is like looking down a tunnel, because the greenery on the boughs still smells of morning dew, because of the death of a dog and someone's badly executed maneuver when turning left, that is to say because of one choice or another, of more choices and still more choices ad infinitum, those maddening had-we-but-known choices impossible to conceptualize because the situation we find ourselves in is complicated, determined by something that is in the nature of neither God nor the devil, something whose ways are impenetrable to us and are doomed to remain so because chance is simply a matter of choosing, but the result of that which might have happened anyway.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“If you will pardon my arbitrary, presumptuous use of the first person plural, then allow me to put it this way: unable to find any ultimate meaning we feel crushed enough already to be fed up with a literature that pretends there is such a thing and keeps hinting at some ultimate meaning.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“. . . and in this nauseating lightheadedness things gradually recede from you just as you too begin to gradually recede from them, in a word it is like when a person lugging a load becomes exhausted by all this lugging and suddenly looking down at his hands sees that there is nothing in them, there never was, that he had been lugging nothing--that is, when you suddenly realize that something is no longer in your possession, just as nothing ever had been.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“No one is harming you, you are fine, you sit in silence, alone in a desolate park after the rain, or in a cozy room abroad, before dawn or as darkness falls, and this self-pity ambushes and takes you by the rudest surprise, devouring and inevitable, because this is when you realize, without understanding it, that nothing exists.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“. . . suddenly my ears registered a grating noise, as if cumbersome chains were clattering in the distance, and my ears registered a slight scraping sound, as if securely knotted ropes were slowly slipping loose -- all I could hear was this grating clatter and this scary scraping, and once more I thought of my ancient language, and of the utter silence into which I had tumbled, I sat there staring at the outside and as complete darkness filled the room only one thing was completely certain: it had broken loose, it was closing in, it was already here.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“. . . it is already here by the time we realize that it has arrived again, always finding us unprepared, even though we ought to be aware that it is coming, that it is secured only temporarily, we ought to hear its chains scraping, loosening, the hiss of knots coming undone in the until then tight cordage, deep down inside us we ought to KNOW that it is about to break loose, and that is how it should have been this time too, we should have known that this is how it would be, that it was bound to come, but we only awoke to the realization, if we awoke at all, that it was here already, and that we were in trouble . . .”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“. . . surely that is the main thing, tranquility, this is what this person seeks in the desired distance, some tranquility from the unspeakably oppressive, painful, insane disquiet that seizes him whenever he happens to think of his starting point, that infinitely foreign land where he is now, and from where he must leave, because everything here is intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly . . .”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

“. . . they forgot about him, which of course doesn't mean he was absent from reality, because he remained there as well, as he went indefatigably between America and Asia, Africa and Europe, it's just that the connection between him and the world was broken, and he became, in this manner, forgotten, invisible, and with this he remained once and for all completely solitary . . .”
― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On