| hlo - Hungarian Literature Online


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07.02.2010 22:44

There are only two options you need to fear:

1) that things will never return to the old rut;

2) that they have already done so.

(Pál Békés)

06.02.2010 09:14

It is deucedly difficult to tell a lie when you don't know the truth.

(Péter Esterházy)

05.19.2010 12:10

"Ah, you've come to meet the author. It doesn't always work out, you know. It's a bit like having a wonderful meal of goose liver, then meeting the goose."

(Arthur Koestler)

04.19.2010 13:22

"I don’t get to the opera as often as I’d like. I’m too busy crawling on my belly, wiping out my fellow men."

(A letter by István Örkény to a friend from the Russian front in World War II)

04.06.2010 20:12

"A poet has no private life to speak of. He uses his feelings, which then, like acids, release meanings from his own and from others’ bodies, filtering out the essential materials from which he creates his poems, volatile non-existent objects. And then from all of that, something that reminds one of life."

(Szilárd Borbély)

03.12.2010 12:36

"And there’s a dead sparrow. Cause of death: life."

(László Garaczi)

02.23.2010 13:01

"Modern medicine made unprecedented progress. Brand new illnesses poised for the anticipated pounce, some had mutated to life on their own accord, others were developed for tactical purposes, but quite a few cued among them were well-tried old syndromes that had hardly been considered illnesses in their own right. One of these was Mental Immune Deficiency, formerly referred to as love."

(István Kemény)

02.05.2010 11:46

"The following are accepted as Negative Characters: Islamic Fundamentalists, Suicide Bombers, Extraterrestrials, Nazis, Fascists, Bolsheviks, Murderous Armed Robbers, Mass Murderers, Desecrators of Dead Bodies, Paedophiles and Anti-EU Demonstrators. Characters not included in the above list are Positive Characters."

(György Spiró: Commission for European Standards: Literary)

01.24.2010 18:20

"He will be driving a car, a big car, preferably red, that he's sitting in. He'll look us over and call out: 'Waiting for me, pussycat?' At this point we'd best look the spermatozoon right between the eyes, right down to the brain, and slowly, confidently assert: 'No. For my menopause, actually.'"

(Krisztina Tóth)

01.13.2010 21:01

"The war can still be won, no question, and I will not argue. But humanity has earned its final mark, a miserably fatal fail. Fair enough. Old age was setting in."

Dezső Szomory (1869–1944)

01.02.2010 20:50

"The 20th century, where we have come from, gave birth to more bad people than it had destroyed. We can no longer live the way we used to, and we cannot yet live the way we should."

(Ernő Polgár)

11.05.2009 09:39

"Luck is the ballgown of the accidental. And the accidental is God's disguise here in the world."

(Tamás Jónás)

09.20.2009 15:39

"And then he proceeded to enumerate the obligations of the revolutionary, ever loyal to the working class, which coincided point by point with the behaviour of a male hamster worried about his winter food supplies."

(Noémi Szécsi)

08.12.2009 12:19

"Everything you call transcendental and earthly is one and the same thing, existing together with you in a single time and single space."

(László Krasznahorkai)

07.20.2009 18:03

"It is only worth publishing ephemeral works; immortal ones can remain in manuscript."

(Béla Hamvas)

07.09.2009 13:31

"I would have liked it if it was that way.
It wasn't that way.
I asked: be that way.
So it became that way."

(Dezső Tandori)

06.03.2009 15:12

"A work of literature can only be created out of love. Emotions like hate, disgust or repugnance can give birth to a newspaper article or a political manifesto, but to a work of art? Never."

(György Spiró)

05.13.2009 08:36

"Try as I might, I find it impossible to be absent-minded, thanks to an intelligence that is keenly aware of each and every step I take. Ergo, I suffer greatly."

(Ernő Szép)

04.14.2009 16:27

"A writer's greatest fear is the dread that, lacking anything new to say, he will some day become witty."

(Imre Kertész)

03.27.2009 13:02

"I have needed many coincidences and the passing of years to understand what tragic consequences it can have if we are not able to accept the rules of Nature, and in particular the mysteriousness of human beings."

(Péter Nádas)

03.10.2009 19:54

"In the end, man is only responsible for what he has planned or aimed for in life; the individual bears responsibility for his intent alone... What, after all, is action, but some kind of an arbitrary surprise? Man stands, and looks on in shock at what he is doing."

(Sándor Márai)

02.24.2009 10:56

"Not everybody who is born is in the world."

(Dezső Szomory)

01.30.2009 10:54

"To be properly creative one needs something else – some special strength or discipline or a mixture of the two; the stuff, I think, they call character."

(Sándor Márai)

01.19.2009 12:04

"Perhaps there is only one way to determine whether a good act is in fact good, always and everywhere: one must sleep on it. For three days, for three hundred years, if necessary, for three thousand years."

(Frigyes Karinthy)

01.07.2009 12:04

"The global economic crisis has a good effect on the health of the Hungarian writer. He writes less, because for what and for whom should he write, and anyway there is nowhere to write for, so he not only imagines a walk, and making love, but actually puts it into practice."

(László Darvasi)

11.25.2008 10:28

"Only the land remained, the silent order of the mountains, the ground covered in fallen dead leaves in the enormous space, a boundless expanse – disguising, concealing, secreting, covering all that lies below the burning earth."

(László Krasznahorkai)

10.26.2008 21:13

"Every morning I take careful stock of my reasons for beginning another day. Then, while drying myself off, I make my arguments against death: a rough, cotton towel is essential to this part of the process."

(György Konrád)

09.09.2008 17:02

"My heart within turned heavy with the wish I were a sea. A vast expanse of clear water that had no need to hold down a job and had no foolish young days here in Budapest, no strange shock of hair, hot and bothered by not knowing what to do; but has an unruly, unbounded, sparkling blue fate."

(Ernő Szép)

07.26.2008 08:59

"The Hungarian language is isolated. The Hungarian language means death for world literature. To write poetry in Hungarian is galley slavery. The Hungarian language is exceptionally suitable for poetry."

(Ágnes Nemes Nagy)

07.09.2008 11:14

"There is no doubt that the artist can only win recognition before posterity in the first and the last place through his works, but it is equally doubtless that if literary history thinks in a truly historical kind of way, the life of a writer must also be seen as one of his works: the writer is not only the paper printed full of text, he is also the symbolic flower and fruit of history, his body, his illnesses, his human struggles are works no less than his poems or his plays."

(Miklós Szentkuthy)

06.27.2008 08:31

"On the list of intellectual values, translation is prescribed as a necessary evil. It is a drug that we take but that we sniff at."

(Ágnes Nemes Nagy)

05.16.2008 10:08

"For Eastern Europe is, despite all its misery and hopelessness, a radient, inspiring, enspiriting landscape, together with Chernobil if you like – one whose magic is impossible to escape. Repellent as it is in its violent, raw and also absurd internal relations and its immorality, these very same qualities captivate us and make it impossible to leave. This is an ambivalent state, and resolution seems forthcoming only through fantasy, a world of hovering visions."

(Ádám Bodor)

04.28.2008 13:55

"'We all have to die some day' – she said.
'But not in a crummy hat like this' – remonstrated the man sentenced to death."

(Gyula Krúdy)

04.16.2008 13:38

"If the US is a human melting pot, then Eastern Europe is a human scrap yard. There – a little of everything, here – not enough of anything."

(Péter Zilahy)

03.17.2008 22:01

"In my youth, I was interested in everything, except perhaps the moral law within me and the starry sky above me."

(Béla Zsolt)

02.25.2008 11:51

"I glance down at my shoe and—there's the lace!

This can't be gaol then, can it, in that case."

(György Petri: To Be Said Over and Over Again)

02.08.2008 12:52

"Buy our exclusive set of world classics concentrated into a suppository. Proust, Kafka, Joyce and other hard to read authors get absorbed through the large intestines in just twenty minutes. Hungarian invention!"

(István Örkény: Spectacular Christmas Sale)

01.14.2008 11:22

"Throughout our entire lives we keep silent about who we are, about the one only we know and cannot reveal to anyone."

(Sándor Márai)

12.17.2007 11:22

"A good style makes everything demonstrable, a great style makes everything great; in short, it is all just a matter of style; in other words, it is all lies."

(Imre Kertész)

11.16.2007 09:22

"A man and a woman. How could they understand one another? They both want something different – the man wants the woman, the woman the man."

(Frigyes Karinthy)

10.09.2007 09:34

"This, comrades, is not a crack; it is a wrinkle of laughter on our bumpy road towards a better future."

(Lajos Parti Nagy)

09.11.2007 11:22

"The apparent loss in weight of a public figure immersed in air-time is equal to the weight of the displaced air-time."

(Ákos Szilágyi)

07.12.2007 12:52

"a team is united by alcohol and its hatred for the coach, which can easily be rephrased to apply to public sentiment under a dictatorship."

(Péter Esterházy)

06.08.2007 12:51

"Sometimes these truisms turn out to be true. Life holds no greater surprise."

(Antal Szerb)

05.20.2007 11:10

"...that's life: a quiet, constant, permanent, well-mannered leave-taking."

(Sándor Márai)

05.03.2007 11:43

"...it is always easier to dream or write the next century than the next half-hour."

(Sándor Márai)

04.17.2007 10:43

"Even in its most threadbare of moments, the fabric of the law still binds the world."

(Krisztina Tóth)

03.22.2007 08:42

"In every real life there comes a moment when one plunges into a passion as if flinging himself over the Niagara falls."

(Sándor Márai)

03.08.2007 10:42

"Fortunately, only the sick and those with broken legs read the work of writers."

(Gyula Krúdy)

02.09.2007 09:10

"the slavery lies in freedom being this,
that not writing is, for some, such slavery
that they must write"

(Dezső Tandori)

01.22.2007 11:10

"It would be superb if in the process of writing, going from one word to the next, from one sentence to the next, there was some way that, like the beam of a flashlight, we could light up our way for and thus catch in the act precisely what is becoming what it does become from being caught in the act."

(Miklós Mészöly)

01.05.2007 11:10

"The most interesting thing in Commonism, and this is truly interesting, is that everything is destroyed, and what is built up in place of the destruction, that work is in itself destruction."

(Endre Kukorelly)

12.05.2006 16:36

"A story should be a spacious, airy hall that you could live in, just strolling around, looking at this or that."

(Péter Lengyel)

11.22.2006 14:36

My heart rests on nothing's branch,
its small body wordlessly trembles,
around it stars gather gently
and stare, stare.

(Attila József)

11.08.2006 16:36

May we still think –
corroded from the start by doubt,
giving up the very right to doubt,
an idiot watchman of stale bathwater,
of the water
in which sat a baby –
may he think of liberation?

(György Petri)

10.10.2006 15:11

All poets carry their pencils in their pockets and their standards on the battlefield. Desks covered in rubble.

Aladár Lászlóffy

09.16.2006 11:11

Our job is to take difficulties and knead them, twisting and turning them, to the point when, quite suddenly, they give us a sense of ease.

(Péter Lengyel)

09.02.2006 18:11

It is not the smart and bright ones that society needs, but rather those who have their sports shoes, compasses and rulers with them.

(Ervin Lázár)

08.15.2006 18:11

This is what is so beautiful about thoughts – they take wings, they fly, they cannot be raked together in a pile like white, dry dogshit in the garden.

(András Maros)

07.16.2006 12:23

Like the body of a pregnant woman, which gradually becomes the body of her child – is this how our life changes until we give birth to death?

(Zsuzsa Beney)

06.22.2006 10:23

Two times two is four.
If you never say it, they forget.
If you say it too many times, they don't believe it.

István Kemény

06.08.2006 09:22

To not understand the world, just because it is not understandable, is dilettantism. The reason we do not understand the world is that this is not our task on this earth.

(Imre Kertész)

06.01.2006 12:23

And as long as you live, something can always happen.

(Antal Szerb)

05.23.2006 12:23

...one should partake of life-giving romance at odd moments, when no one's looking..

(István Kemény)

05.12.2006 11:15

Truth is a flaming torch, one of massive size; so great that we all try to sidle past with our eyes squinting, making sure we don’t even get scorched by it.

(Péter Esterházy)

05.01.2006 12:22

I understand everything in everybody ever since I have come to understand that we can never understand anything in anybody.

(Dezső Tandori)

03.27.2006 10:14

You can recognize Hungarians by two things. When they talk, they speak in a weird, obscure language full of E sounds; when they are silent, they seem to be wondering about what on earth they are.

(László Márton)

03.16.2006 09:34

Happy are those who / give birth in the dark night.

(Zsuzsa Takács)

03.03.2006 11:16

Sometimes it seems as if the history of thinking traced out the journey of one sound creature, his spectral face in unfathomable existence.

(András Jeles)

02.13.2006 11:15

Your lies wait for you around the corner.

(András Forgách)

01.19.2006 11:15

...the angel is in the details.

(György Petri)

01.12.2006 11:16

Those who lose their whole find their parts.

(Dezső Tandori)

01.03.2006 11:34

He didn't like stories where someone set off and arrived, because beginnings are blurry and the end filled him with anxiety.

(Éva Bánki)

12.21.2005 08:31

No matter what you believe in, you'll die, but if you do not believe in anything, you are dead alive.

(Imre Kertész)

12.08.2005 08:31

We need sacrifice in order to lose ourselves and find our identity.

(Miklós Mészöly)

11.29.2005 08:31

Daydreaming is good, though if one wakes up.

(Endre Kukorelly)

11.10.2005 15:42

The impatient are unhappy, because they always want
something and always get what they didn't want.

(Péter Nádas)

10.24.2005 16:44

There is no way out of the labyrinth; only an aimless further on.

(György Petri)

10.14.2005 15:27

Where we are is so horribly far away.

(Lajos Parti Nagy)

10.07.2005 11:57

Do not hope and do not give up!

(László Márton)