Herman Koch Quotes

It's my experience that when people go on repeating your first name, they want something from you, and it's usually not something you want to give.

I looked at him. I wondered what it would be like to have a father whose face you couldn't see. Whether a day would finally come when, as the daughter of a father like that, you simply lost patience - or whether you got used to it, like bad wallpaper.

An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off. A day to deal with the worst of the garbage.

And then it happened. It was a detail, no more than that. A detail to which you pay no attention at first. That takes on meaning only later. In retrospect.

When we were still living at home, all he ever drank was cola, huge amounts of it; he had no problem knocking back an entire king-size bottle at dinnertime. Then he would produce these gigantic belches, for which he was sometimes sent to his room, belches that lasted ten years or longer
like subterranean thunder rolling up and exploding from somewhere deep down in his stomach
and for which he enjoyed a certain schoolyard fame: among the boys, that is, for he knew even then that girls were only repulsed by burps and farts.

Life as a widow, she thinks, will always be like this. The friends will go on proposing toasts for months (for years!). To her. To their new center of attention. What she doesn't know yet is that, after a few courtesy calls, it will all be over. The silence that will follow is the same silence that always falls after a life in the shadows.

During a working day, there's nothing I look forward to more than an evening of nothing at all. A meal. A beer or a glass of wine. The evening news on TV. A B movie or a soccer match. A working day like that gets off on the right foot. It's a day with promise.

The evenings were the worst. I stood at the window of my hotel room and looked at the traffic and the thousands of little lights and the people who all seemed to be on their way to something.

Without Claire I wouldn't have been nowhere, but I would have been somewhere else.

What barely seemed to register with him was that those regular people were earning large sums of money off him, off the Dutchman with his summer home and his money, and it was in part for that reason that they continued to exercise a modicum of courtesy.

If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn't have to be validated.

… when Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be. My own voice, above all, asking him what he wanted in his sandwich, also sounded as it should have. The larder was full, I had done all of the shopping that morning. I took care of myself as well, I looked in the mirror before leaving the house: I made sure my clothes were clean, that I had shaved, that my hair didn't look like the hair of someone who never looks in a mirror - the people in the supermarket would have noticed nothing unusual, I was no divorced father reeking of alcohol, no father who couldn't handle things. I clearly remembered the goal I had set for myself: I wanted to keep up the appearance of normality. As far as possible, everything had to remain the same for Michel as long as his mother wasn't around. A hot meal every day, for a start. But also in other aspects of our temporary single-parent family, there shouldn't be too many visible changes. Normally, it wasn't my habit to shave every day; I didn't mind walking around with stubble. Claire had never made a big deal out of that either, but during those weeks I shaved every morning. I felt that my son had a right to sit at the table with a clean-smelling, freshly shaven father. A freshly shaven and clean-smelling father would not prompt him to think the wrong things, would in any case not cause him to doubt the temporary character of our single-parent family.

His honest eyes that had always been so bad at lying.

I amazed myself, above all, with how well I was able to manage. Michel got to school on time, his teeth brushed and his clothes clean. More or less clean: I was less critical of a few spots on his trousers than Claire would have been, but then I was his father. I've never tried to be 'both father and mother' to him, the way some half-assed, home-made-sweater-wearing head of a single-parent household put it once in some bullshit programme I saw on afternoon TV.

Suicide is a realistic option, I hear myself saying a minute later. Some people take comfort in the realization that they have control over the way their life ends. What they dread most of all is the implementation. The way in which. A train is so violent. Cutting your wrists in the bathtub is so bloody. Hanging is painful - it takes a long time before death comes. Sleeping pills may be vomited up. But there are substances that bring about a painless, easy death.

Some people might say it's not smart to be so insecure about what you wear. But that's not how I see it. The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn't need any help. What does a man know about things like that? a stupid woman thinks, and proceeds to make the wrong choice.

A reader reads a book. If it's a good book, he forgets himself. That's all a book has to do. When the reader can't forget himself and keeps having to think about the writer the whole time, the book is a failure. That has nothing to do with fun. If it's fun you're after, buy a ticket for a roller coaster. That

It's like a pistol in a stage play: when someone waves a pistol during the first act, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will be shot with it before the curtain falls. That's the law of drama. The law that says no pistol must appear if no one's going to fire it.

He was drunk, he did his best to keep talking in the hope that she wouldn't notice, but he felt his words slipping away, struggling to keep their balance - while yet other words kept sticking together. "Jan, I'm hanging up now. I don't want to talk to you.

His eyes had something dull about them, expressionless, the bored look of a mediocre intelligence that wrongly supposes it has seen it all before.

This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance - or six, or eight, don't ask me. Personally, I'd never want to know three months in advance where I'm going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don't mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they'll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called "top" restaurants.

Even when you act like nothing is happening, something happens - I don't know how to put it any more clearly. It's

It also has to do with my profession. In my profession, true relaxation is a necessity.

Biology is a force to be reckoned with. An ugly child you love with all your heart and soul, you. But it's different. You're pleased with your third-floor walk-up, also, until someone invites you I've to dinner at a house with a pool in the garden.

Flippancy. A laughing matter. It's like with funerals. They are, first and foremost, expected to be fun. There is laughter and drinking and bad language. To keep the whole thing from being too bourgeois. A bourgeois funeral is an artist's worst nightmare.

These were the ways and moves of … of a predator. The thought popped into my mind without my being able to stop it. 'Of an athlete' was what I had meant to say – to think. A sportsman.

We looked at each other. At that moment, I was also a hundred percent sure that Van Dieren and I were thinking the same thing. But he didn

I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they've had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one family member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be - and not only you, but virtually the entire family - if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past - I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I used it as an example because it's the one that most appeals to their imaginations - and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it's impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes

Happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn't have to be validated. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way.

A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell;

Something in me whispered that I needed to stop thinking, that I should above all not go too far
with thinking. But that never worked; I always thought things through to the end, to their most
extreme consequence.

I sometimes heard the parents of Michel's playmates sigh about how, after a busy day, they really needed "a moment to themselves." The children were in bed at last, and then came the magic moment, and not a minute earlier. I've always thought that was strange, because for me that moment began much earlier. When Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be.

A look says more than words alone. That's a cliche, of course. But a cliche, also says more than words alone.

In one way or another, every parent is curious what their children ... what are they doing when we don't see? ... What double lives are they leading? Is there something else?

When the conversation turns too quickly to films,I see it as a sign of weakness.

Some people need a kick in the ass, others just need to think less for a couple of hours.

The first thing that struck you about Claire's plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I'm well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.
It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. 'You wouldn't even dare!' the plate said, and laughed in your face.

By using the word 'tolerance,' you're simply placing yourself on a higher plane than those you tolerate. Tolerance is only possible when one fosters a deep-rooted sense of superiority.

Anger made her prettier. Especially her eyes - it was a look that put men to shame.

That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, or else I would die, but I had lost my appetite.

I looked and felt my head gradually grow cold. It was the sort of coldness you feel when you take too big a bite from an ice-cream cone or sip too greedily from an ice-cold drink. The kind of coldness that hurt - from the inside out.

Christ, what an asshole! Babette said.

I got the sneaky feeling that I was present at something at which I would rather not be present. It made me think of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Of Oprah Winfrey.

The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn't need any help.

Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can't stand silence - especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone.

I'm not going to say what was wrong with Claire, not here. I consider that a private matter. It's nobody's business what kind of illnesses you've had - in any case it's up to her if she wants to talk about it, and not up to me.

It glistens, it gleams, I

The chair was Claire's, it belonged to my wife. Without a doubt, he could now feel her body heat, left behind on the seat, right through the cloth of his trousers. The thought of it made me furious.

At Kayenta we were told that the entire Navajo Indian reservation was dry; you couldn't get a drop of alcohol anywhere. Not with dinner,but also not at the supermarket. "It's like Iran," Caroline said, taking a sip of her Coke. "But right in the middle of America.

Movie or no, you should never put pictures of the book's characters on the cover. That only cramps the reader's fantasy. You force him to keep seeing the faces of the actors in the movie. For someone who has seen the movie first and then, out of curiosity, goes on to read the whole book, that might not be so bad. But anyone who reads the book first is faced with a dilemma. During the reading he sees the faces of all the characters in his mind's eye. Faces he wants to assemble with his own fantasy. No matter how those faces may be described. Despite your superfluous descriptions of noses, eyes, ears, and hair color, each reader constructs his own faces in his own imagination. Three hundred thousand readers; that's three hundred thousand different faces for each character. Three hundred thousand faces that are destroyed at one fell swoop by that one face in the movie. As a reader, it's pretty tough to remember that imaginary face after seeing the actor on the screen. Two

He was, in any case, more intelligent than the moronic heap of compost sitting across the desk from me

-You give her a three, he said ...
-That three was entirely fitting, I said. It was complete garbage. Not the kind of thing I expect the
students to hand in ... In addition to the Second World War, I also deal with a large part of the history that came afterwards,' I interrupted again. Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, the Middle East and Israel, the Six-Day
War, the Yom Kippur War, the Palestinians. I deal with all of that during my classes. So then you
can't expect to turn in a paper about the state of Israel in which people mostly pick oranges and dance
in sandals around a campfire. Cheerful, happy people everywhere, and all that horseshit about the
desert where flowers blossom again. I mean, people are shot and killed there every day, buses are
blown up. What's this all about?
-She came in here crying, Paul.
-I'd cry too if I turned in garbage like that.