Herman Koch Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Herman Koch

“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

“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.”

— Herman Koch

“All these heads, I thought. All these heads into which everything disappears.”

— Herman Koch

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

— Herman Koch

“The dilemma I was faced with was one every parent faces sooner or later: you want to defend your child, of course; you stand up for your child, but you mustn't do it all too vehemently, and above all not too eloquently - you mustn't drive anyone into a corner. The educators, the teachers, will let you have your say, but afterwards they'll take revenge on your child. You may come up with better arguments - it's not too hard to come up with better arguments than the educators, the teachers - but in the end, your child to going to pay for it. Their frustration at being shown up is something they'll take out on the student.”

— Herman Koch

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

— Herman Koch

“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

“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

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

“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

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

— Herman Koch

“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

“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

“You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy artillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn't go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean.”

— Herman Koch

“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

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.

— Herman Koch

“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

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

— Herman Koch

“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.”

— Herman Koch

“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

Er was een dokter in de zaal.

— Herman Koch

“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

“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

“-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.”

— Herman Koch

“I liked being inside the head of someone who reveals himself unknowingly while he still thinks most people find him sympathetic. DG:”

— Herman Koch

“Christ, what an asshole! Babette said.”

— Herman Koch

“Het was van dat weer dat je niet weet of het al avond wordt of dat de dag nog moet beginnen ...”

— Herman Koch

“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

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

— Herman Koch

“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

“No, on the outside view there was nothing for anyone to notice about me. I remained one pillar of a trinity, another pillar was lying only temporarily (temporarily! temporarily! temporarily!) in the hospital, I was the pilot of a three-engine aircraft, one of whose engines had stalled: there is no reason to panic, this is not a crash landing, the pilot has thousands of flight hours behind him, he will land the plane safely on the ground.”

— Herman Koch

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

— Herman Koch

“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

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

— Herman Koch

“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

“Paul reveals more about himself than he probably realizes. He isn't too aware of who he really is.”

— Herman Koch

Het was mijn ervaring dat je tegenover lagere intelligenties het beste glashard kon liegen; met een leugen bood je de sufferds de mogelijkheid om zich zonder gezichtsverlies terug te trekken.

— Herman Koch

“That's the oppressive thing about happiness, the way everything is out on the table like an open book:”

— Herman Koch

Nee, het rampzalige was wanneer ze je begonnen te vragen 'wat je nou eigenlijk wilde in dit leven?', terwijl ze zelf toch het beste voorbeeld gaven van hoe je het in elk geval niet aan moest pakken.

— Herman Koch

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

— Herman Koch

“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

“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

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.

— Herman Koch

“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

“Around here, we're as happy as God in France.”

— Herman Koch