Harry Mulisch Quotes

A man who has never been hungry may possess a more refined palate, but he has no idea what it means to eat.

If you find life absurd, shouldn’t you find death precisely meaningful?

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap.

I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few others things besides, and that means he is not small. The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness.

But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute.

I'm afraid love is just a word.

All cows were like other cows, all tigers like all other tigers - What on earth happened to human beings?

Perhaps, he thought, true pure love, like all flowers, flourished best with its roots in muck and mud. Perhaps that was a law of life that held everything together.

That question is too good to spoil with an answer.

Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that's hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory.

If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet,a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of 500 Bibles.In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves. That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept -- namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books.

Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

All human beings were of course unique, and they only discovered that when someone else fell in love with them or when no one ever fell in love with them.