War & War Quotes

“...what one ought to capture in beauty is that which is treacherous and irresistible...”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“...and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ's sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at age 44, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last 44 years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for 44 years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in an effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand, was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when, after a couple of days, he noticed that there was something the matter with his head.”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“It was a long struggle against invisible foes, or to put it more accurately, against invisible foes that might not have been there at all, but it was a victorious struggle, in the course of which they understood that the victory would only be unconditional if they annihilated or, if he might put it in such old fashioned terms, said Korin, exiled, exiled anything that might have stood against them, or rather, fully absorbed it into the repulsive vulgarity of the world they now ruled, ruled if not exactly commanded, and thereby besmirched whatever was good and transcendent, not by saying a haughty 'no' to good and transcendent things, no, for they understood that the important thing was to say 'yes' from the meanest of motives, to give them their outright support, to display them, to nurture them; it was this that dawned on them and showed them what to do, that their best option was not to crush their enemies, to mock them or wipe them off the face of the earth, but, on the contrary, to embrace them, to take responsibility for them and so to empty them of their content, and in this way to establish a world in which it was precisely these things that would be the most liable to spread the infection so that the only power that had any chance of resisting them, by whose radiant light it might still have been possible to see the degree to which they had taken over people's lives... how could he make himself clearer at this point, Korin hesitated...”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“Should we die, the mechanics of life would go on without us, and that is what people feel most terribly disturbed by,' Korin interrupted himself, bowed his head, thought for a while, then pulled an agonized expression and started slowly swiveling his head, 'though it is only the very fact that it goes on that enables us properly to understand that there is no mechanism.”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“...the freedom produced by love was the highest condition available in the given order of things, and given that, how strange it was that such love seemed to be characteristic of lonely people who were condemned to live in perpetual isolation, that love was one of the aspects of loneliness most difficult to resolve, and therefore all those millions on millions of individual loves and individual rebellions could never add up to a single love or rebellion, and that because all those millions upon millions of individual experiences testified to the unbearable fact of the world's ideological opposition to this love and rebellion, the world could never transcend its own first great act of rebellion..”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“. . .Kasser picked up the subject of pure love, that wholly pure love, the clear love, said Korin, and what was more, he added, spoke only about that, not about the lesser kinds of love, the wholly pure love of which he spoke being resistance, the deepest and perhaps only noble form of revolt, because only love of this kind allowed a person to become perfectly, unconditionally, and in all respects free, and therefore, naturally, dangerous in the eyes of this world, for this was the way things were, Falke added, and if we looked at love from this point of view, seeing the man of love as the sole dangerous thing in the world, the man of love being one who shrinks in disgust from lies and becomes incapable of lying, and is conscious to an unprecedented extent of the scandalous distance between the pure love of his own constitution and the irredeemably impure order of the world’s constitution, since in his eyes it isn’t even a matter of love being perfect freedom, the perfect freedom, but that love, this particular love, made any lack of freedom completely unbearable, which is what Kasser too had said though he had put it slightly differently, but in any case, Kasser resumed, what this meant was that the freedom produced by love was the highest condition available in the given order of things, and given that, how strange it was that such love seemed to be characteristic of lonely people who were condemned to live in perpetual isolation, that love was one of the aspects of loneliness most difficult to resolve, and therefore all those millions on millions of individual loves and individual rebellions could never add up to a single love or rebellion, and that because all those millions upon millions of individual experiences testified to the unbearable fact of the world’s ideological opposition to this love and rebellion, the world could never transcend its own first great act of rebellion. . .”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“. . .what became clear was that most opinions were a waste of time, that it was a waste thinking that life was a matter of appropriate conditions and appropriate answers, because the task was not to choose but to accept, there being no obligation to choose between what was appropriate and what was inappropriate, only to accept that we are not obliged to do anything except to comprehend that the appropriateness of the one great universal process of thinking is not predicated on it being correct, for there was nothing to compare it with, nothing but its own beauty, and it was its beauty that gave us confidence in its truth. . .”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“The only streetlights burning were those at the top of the stairs and the light they gave fell in dingy cones that shuddered in the intermittent gusts of winds assailing them because the other neon lights positioned in the thirty or so meters between them had all been broken, leaving them squatting in darkness, yet as aware of each other, of their precise positions, as of the enormous mass of dark sky above the smashed neon, the sky which might have glimpsed the reflection of its own enormous dark mass as it trembled with stars in the vista of railway yards spreading below it, had there been some relationship between the trembling stars and the twinkling dull red lights of semaphores sprinkled among the rails, but there wasn't, there was no common denominator, no interdependence between them, the only order and relationship existing within the discrete worlds of above and below, and indeed of anywhere, for the field of stars and the forest of signals stared as blankly at each other as does each and every form of being, blind in darkness and blind in radiance, as blind on earth as it is in heaven, if only so that a long moribund symmetry among this vastness might appear in the lost glance of some higher being, at the center of which, naturally, there would be a minuscule blind spot: as with Korin . . . the footbridge . . . the seven kids.”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“to describe the punishment or price set by fate for his recognition of this state of affairs.”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“... what this meant was that the freedom produced by love was the highest condition available in the given order of things, and given that, how strange it was that such love seemed to be characteristic of lonely people who were condemned to live in perpetual isolation, that love was one of the aspects of loneliness most difficult to resolve, and therefore all those millions on millions of individual loves and individual rebellions could never add up to a single love or rebellion, and that because all those millions upon millions of individual experiences testified to the unbearable fact of the world’s ideological opposition to this love and rebellion...”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“All is false by now, he shook his head, it is all one lie after another, and these lies so permeate the most obscure recesses of our souls that they leave no room for expectations or for hope,”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“it deeply grieved him to report that the future of mankind was standing before them in his, Korin’s, person, for he was already living in the future, in a future where it had become absolutely impossible to speak of loss because the very act of speaking had become impossible, for everything you said in the language turned into a lie the instant you pronounced it,”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“the place where he might have deposited his personal memory was lost, that’s to say he couldn’t even give the things he had lost a decent burial, the place had sunk, vanished without trace, and the knowledge of a higher order of things that was once part of him had sunk with it,”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“when he first determined that it would be he who would finally inform the denizens of heaven that the reign of good was finally at an end, that its time, like the time remaining for him to render his account, was run; then, at that point of decision, he had hoped that he would be able to describe the fatal wounding of his spirit, the sense of being hunted and struck down by melancholy at one and the same time, to describe the punishment or price set by fate for his recognition of this state of affairs”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“To love order is to love life: love of order is therefore love of symmetry, and love of symmetry is a memory of eternal truth,”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“that which is too big for us is altogether too big,”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“whereas when he met with victory or with victors, it would always be a cold feeling, an icy-cold feeling of repulsion that seized him, that spread through his entire being, not hatred as such, nor quite contempt, but more a kind of incomprehension, meaning that he could not understand victory or victors, the joy experienced by the triumphant not being joy to him,”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“having, as he did, an inborn antipathy to life’s winners so that he could never be part of any celebration or feel the intoxication of triumph, for it just wasn’t in him to identify with such things only with defeat, and that identification was immediate, instinctive, and ran to anyone at all who had been condemned to suffer loss;”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“the sight of such beauty borne with such regal modesty in combination with a figure of such beggarly degeneracy represented a serious disturbance in the even tenor of official life, indeed,”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“mire ő kijelentette, hogy magyarok nincsenek, hungarian no exist, már kihaltak, they died out, körülbelül úgy száz-százötven évvel ezelőtt kezdődött, és valami hihetetlen módon, tudniillik teljesen észrevétlenül, hungarian?, no exist?, csóválta meg a fejét hitetlenkedve a nő, yes, they died out, erősítette meg határozottan Korim, valamikor a múlt századtól fogva, mivel volt itt egy nagyon nagy keveredés, amiben a végére nem maradt egyetlen magyar sem, csak egy keverék, meg néhány sváb, cigány, szlovák meg osztrák meg zsidó meg román meg horvát meg szerb és így to- vább, és főleg ezeknek a keveréke, de a magyarok eltűntek közben, győzködte a nőt Korim, csak Magyarország van még meg a magyarok helyén, Hungary yes, hungarian not, de már egyetlen őszinte, ép emlék se arról, micsoda különös, nagyszerű, büszke, fékezhetetlen népség volt ez itt, mert az volt, nagyon vad és nagyon tiszta törvények között, akiket kizárólag a nagy tettek örökös véghezvitele tartott ébren, barbárok, akik aztán lassan elvesztették az érdeklődésüket a kis tettekre berendezkedett világ iránt, és elvesztek, degenerálódtak, kipusztultak és elkeveredtek, és nem maradt belőlük más, csak a nyelvük, a költészetük és valami apró, hogyan?, jelezte akkor a nő a homlokát ráncolva, hogy nem érti, de így történt, és az a legérdekesebb, bár őt már nem érdekli egyáltalán, hogy degenerálódásukról és kihalásukról nem beszél senki, az egész ügyről nincs más, csak hazugság, tévedés, félreértés és hülyeség”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“egyszerűen csak arról van szó, magyarázta később a hét gyereknek, hogy egy napon ,"eltört nála a mécses", mert most ha visszagondol, az ő története valójában nem is azzal a bizonyos folyóparttal indult, hanem jóval korábban, jóval a folyóparti események előtt, amikor egyszer elfogta egy addig ismeretlen, egy addig teljességgel ismeretlen mélységű és az ő egész lényét alapjaiban megrázó elkeseredés, hirtelen, egyik napról a másikra egyszer csak azon vette észre magát, hogy nagyon, hogy halálosan el van keseredve, amiként akkoriban fogalmazott, "a világ állapota" miatt, és ez nem valami gyorsan érkező és gyorsan múló hangulat következtében állt nála elő, hanem hát, ez egy olyan iszonyú éles bevillanás volt, mondta, ami örökre beég, tudniillik bevillant neki, hogy a világban, ha volt is, már nincsen semmiféle nemes, nem akarja eltúlozni, de tényleg, komolyan, hogy őkörülötte talán nem is volt, mindenesetre soha többé nem is lesz se szép, se jó”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War

“. . .really, he didn’t want to be a nuisance to anyone, nor would he, he decided, be a nuisance, then sat down on the bed, got up again, went over to the window, then sat back down on the bed once more, before getting up again, and so it went on for several minutes, since the feeling of joy continued welling up in him, overwhelming him, so time and again he had to sit down or stand up and eventually achieved complete happiness by pulling the table ever so gently over to the window, turning it so the light should fall fully on it, drew up the chair, then sat on the bed and stared at the table, at the arrangement of it, stared and stared, gauging whether the light was falling on it in the best possible way, then turning the chair a little so that it was at a different angle to the table, so it should fit better, staring at that now, and it was plain that the happiness was almost too much for him, for he now had somewhere to live, a place with a table and a chair, because he was happy that Mr. Sárváry existed in the first place, and that he should have this apartment on the top floor of 547 West 159th Street, right next to the stairs to the attic, and without the resident’s name on the door.”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War