Top 55 Herman Koch Quotes
#1. Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.
Herman Koch
#2. 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.
Herman Koch
#3. Without Claire I wouldn't have been nowhere, but I would have been somewhere else.
Herman Koch
#4. 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.
Herman Koch
#5. No longer in print ... There are sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival ... For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that category.
Herman Koch
#6. Some people need a kick in the ass, others just need to think less for a couple of hours.
Herman Koch
#7. 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.
Herman Koch
#8. 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.
Herman Koch
#9. There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.
Herman Koch
#10. His eyes had something dull about them, expressionless, the bored look of a mediocre intelligence that wrongly supposes it has seen it all before.
Herman Koch
#11. Technically, just like with the rings of a tree or Carbon-14, it had to be possible to measure the passage of time by the melting of vanilla ice cream.
Herman Koch
#12. 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.
Herman Koch
#13. 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?
Herman Koch
#14. All these heads, I thought. All these heads into which everything disappears.
Herman Koch
#15. 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.
Herman Koch
#16. Your wife's willingness to allow a daughter to grow inside her who had, by all laws of probability, a fifty-percent chance of inheriting your face, is something you should view as a compliment. Perhaps the greatest compliment a woman can give a man.
Herman Koch
#17. 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.
Herman Koch
#18. 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.
Herman Koch
#19. Paul reveals more about himself than he probably realizes. He isn't too aware of who he really is.
Herman Koch
#20. His honest eyes that had always been so bad at lying.
Herman Koch
#21. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can't stand silence - especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone.
Herman Koch
#22. 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.
Herman Koch
#23. Christ, what an asshole! Babette said.
Herman Koch
#24. 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.
Herman Koch
#25. 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.
Herman Koch
#26. This was happening to me more often lately: suddenly, pieces of the puzzle were gone - bites out of time, empty moments during which my thoughts must have been elsewhere.
Herman Koch
#27. Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about the house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it's still vacant.
Herman Koch
#28. A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell;
Herman Koch
#29. That's the oppressive thing about happiness, the way everything is out on the table like an open book:
Herman Koch
#30. A look says more than words alone. That's a cliche, of course. But a cliche, also says more than words alone.
Herman Koch
#31. Even when you act like nothing is happening, something happens - I don't know how to put it any more clearly. It's
Herman Koch
#32. 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.
Herman Koch
#33. When the conversation turns too quickly to films,I see it as a sign of weakness.
Herman Koch
#34. He was, in any case, more intelligent than the moronic heap of compost sitting across the desk from me
Herman Koch
#35. 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.
Herman Koch
#36. 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.
Herman Koch
#38. 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.
Herman Koch
#39. 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.
Herman Koch
#40. Is it life threatening? they asked. They said it slightly sotto voce, but you could hear the thirst for sensation right through it: when people get a chance to come close to death without having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity.
Herman Koch
#41. 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.
Herman Koch
#42. 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
Herman Koch
#43. Around here, we're as happy as God in France.
Herman Koch
#44. It also has to do with my profession. In my profession, true relaxation is a necessity.
Herman Koch
#45. Anger made her prettier. Especially her eyes - it was a look that put men to shame.
Herman Koch
#46. 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.
Herman Koch
#47. 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.
Herman Koch
#48. Yet there was something else, something different about her this time, like a room where someone has thrown out all the flowers while you were gone: a change in the interior you don't even notice at first, not until you see the stems sticking out of the garbage.
Herman Koch
#49. 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.
Herman Koch
#50. His voice, which always carried right across the lawn. A voice like a foghorn. A voice that tankers and container vessels might use to find their bearings in distant estuaries and foreign ports.
Herman Koch
#51. The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn't need any help.
Herman Koch
#52. I let go of the pump as well now. I registered a sense of fatigue. And regret. It was the same fatigue and regret you feel when you miss a tennis ball. You were planning to smash it, but you swing hard and miss; the arm holding the racket meets no resistance and lashes wildly through the air.
Herman Koch
#53. I liked being inside the head of someone who reveals himself unknowingly while he still thinks most people find him sympathetic. DG:
Herman Koch
#54. 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.
Herman Koch
#55. Back in the shadows, in the darkest part of the garden beside the hedge, the skinny choreographer was making out with the younger member of the writer couple. I saw a hand slip inside a shirt and looked the other way.
Herman Koch
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