Jean Améry QUOTES

1 " Life ... is a burden. The day about to begin is an oppressive weight.... The erect penis is heavy, even heavier the hanging one. Even the most tender breast has to be dragged along. "

― Jean Améry , On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death

2 " [F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number. "

― Jean Améry , At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities

3 " I am true only as I see and understand myself deep within; I am what I am for myself and in myself, and nothing else. "

― Jean Améry , At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities

4 " Rien n'arrive ni comme on l'espère, ni comme on le craint', dice Proust en algún pasaje de su obra. Nada, en efecto, sucede como lo esperamos ni como lo tememos. "

― Jean Améry , At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities

5 " The poem no longer transcended reality. "

― Jean Améry

6 " רק בשמי מותר לי לדבר - ואף על פי כן, גם אם בזהירות, בשמם של אותם מבני דורי, מליונים מן הסתם, שיהדותם ניחתה בם פתאום, כמכח איתני טבע, והיה עליהם לעמוד בה בלי אלוהים, בלי היסטוריה, בלי אמונה משחית יהודית. לגביהם, לגבי, להיות יהודי פירושו לחוש בתוך את משא הטרגדיה של אמש. על אמת ידי השמאלית חקוק המספר של אושוויץ; קצר הוא לקריאה מן החומש ומן התלמוד, ובכל זאת יש בו מידע ממצה יותר. הוא אף מהימן יותר בתור נוסחת יסוד הקיום היהודי. כשאני אומר לעצמי ולעולם, כולל ליהודים המחזיקים ביהדותם מטעמים דתיים ולאומיים, שאינם רואים בי אחד משלהם, כשאני אומר: 'אני יהודי', אני מתכוון בכך אל העובדות והאפשרויות המקופלות במספר של אושוויץ" - ז'אן אמרי מתוך "מעבר לאשמה ולכפרה" [At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities] "

― Jean Améry , At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities

7 " I demand a closed chamber, for regrettably, what the accused has proposed to reveal here is a danger to public morals. The defendant, infected by his wife’s dissoluteness, which judicial language lacks words to describe, is the most appalling specimen I have ever come across in the long course of my life as a guardian of order and morals. Look at him, how he sits there, his gaze unmoved, at his table at the inn, hatching his plans for murder, necrophilia, and sodomy, le visage blême, serrant dans la main gauche la fiole avec le poison [50]—the palefaced killer! "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

8 " Born poor, little earned besides, brought up dumb, little learned besides. Your penknife, Gustave Flaubert, and oui and merci, all too mean and too meager. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

9 " So Gustave Flaubert was playing as he composed Madame Bovary, groaning under the crushing weight of words; and the game plays out further in these pages, albeit according to a different set of rules. Charles Bovary, the poor man from whom everything was stripped away, love, his beloved, his possessions, and even his memory—for, as he is forced to realize, he has lived in error—was treated by Gustave Flaubert as a quantité négligeable. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

10 " And yet, holding fast to the precarious stability of quotidian jargon, accepting without argument the ludic maxims conceived by the bourgeois Flaubert, it remains permissible to move beyond the element of play and to question the reality of this country doctor now present in the imaginative life of millions, over whom the ownership claims of the bourgeois landowner from Croisset have long expired—even without hope of any “real” insight. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

11 " The haut bourgeois Gustave Flaubert, whose income was secured and who found protection in his father’s name against the judges who would ultimately pronounce, as was foreseeable, a balanced verdict on his novel, deeply detested the petit bourgeois, the country doctor, whom he had most likely met with or else had heard disparaging remarks about from his father’s lips, "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

12 " is conceivable. “Enough of these riding excursions with that imposter from La Huchette. Let him debauch himself with his degenerate floozies from Paris. So the farmer’s daughter Rouault isn’t good enough to be the wife of Monsieur, his false Excellency. Well she is too good and too precious to be his whore.” This is not inconceivable, rather the opposite: it suggests itself. For not even the petit bourgeois from the days following the Revolution would truckle under slavishly before someone who happened to live in a castle, go hunting, and dress in finery. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

13 " Now that I am enlightened, through mourning and the letters in the secret drawer, I would say to you, "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

14 " The operation turned out badly—what can you say? More than once in Rouen I’ve seen a patient meet his end in the operating room under the well-groomed hands of Dr. Achille-Cléophas Flaubert. That is how it goes in our line of work, which you don’t know a damned thing about. One time you get lucky, the next you don’t, that’s the end of the story. So undress and lie down next to me, and I will claim my conjugal rights, just as I perform my marital duties as a sound husband and provider. Not a word more! "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

15 " And I didn’t take it hard, at least young Léon would have been an understanding schoolmate, devoted and ready to serve, nothing like the haughty, highborn Gustave. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

16 " It merely remains to say in what his realism consists. What we mean here is not the work’s autonomous reality as a linguistic structure: that is there regardless, whether in Zola or Mallarmé, in Goethe or Hölderlin, in Robbe-Grillet or Simenon. The possibilities and limitations of such a theme would take us too far from Flaubert. What is proposed here is rather an intersubjectively graspable and subjectively experienced reality no less valid for Bovary’s master than for the person who consciously seeks it out. Willingly or not, Gustave Flaubert has distilled this reality into the twin avatars of money and flesh. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

17 " His assets—inherited, not earned—had vanished. If the book had been brought to its end, the hopeless imbeciles Bouvard and Pécuchet would have logically sought refuge in death. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

18 " However we might be deceived by his irony, which would prove fatal for false romanticism, he took the side of Emma and her finally murderous passion with its contempt for the bourgeois subject. He failed to see the citoyen, in both Homais and the country doctor; he only saw, only fashioned, the bourgeois that he himself was, endowing him with the repellent traits of the merchant Lheureux. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

19 " Ktoś raz torturowany, na zawsze pozostaje torturowanym. "

― Jean Améry

20 " Your penknife, Flaubert. "

― Jean Améry , Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: A Portrait of a Simple Man

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