Reading Liquidation now, by Nobel-Prize winner Imre Kertész.
Anyhow, quotes from the first book are below:
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."
"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size."
“The human frame being what it is, heart, body, and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well”
“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.”
“Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?”
“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”
“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
“If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...”
"...when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.”
“One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads - for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf. . .”
“... a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”
