Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.
— Harry Mulisch
The most proven Harry Mulisch quotes to get the best of your day
A man who has never been hungry may possess a more refined palate, but he has no idea what it means to eat.
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?
That question is too good to spoil with an answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute.
If you find life absurd, shouldn’t you find death precisely meaningful?
