Top 30 Herman Koch Quotes (2025 Update)

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. I thought about her cheerful face. When I said to her what I said, it broke down the middle. Like a vase. Or like a glass that shatters at a high-pitched note. I.”

— Herman Koch

2. “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

3. “Er was een dokter in de zaal.”

— Herman Koch

4. “Ja, zo zou het gaan. Het zou nooit meer gebeuren, maandenlang nooit meer gebeuren – tot het een volgende keer toch weer gebeurde.”

— Herman Koch

5. “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

6. “Suicide is a realistic option, I hear myself saying a minute later. Some people take comfort in the realization that they have control over the way their life ends. What they dread most of all is the implementation. The way in which. A train is so violent. Cutting your wrists in the bathtub is so bloody. Hanging is painful – it takes a long time before death comes. Sleeping pills may be vomited up. But there are substances that bring about a painless, easy death.”

— Herman Koch

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

— Herman Koch

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

— Herman Koch

9. “A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell; the actual evening is hell itself.”

— Herman Koch

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “When people get a chance to come close to death without having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity.”

— Herman Koch

14. “You sometimes hear about people who have lost their sense of smell and taste: for those people, a plate of the most delicious food means nothing at all. That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, otherwise I would die, but I had lost my appetite.”

— Herman Koch

15. “It’s my experience that when people go on repeating your first name, they want something from you, and it’s usually not something you want to give.”

— Herman Koch

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Herman Koch

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Without Claire I wouldn’t have been nowhere, but I would have been somewhere else.”

— Herman Koch

23. “It was war. You’re better off winning a war than losing it. History teaches us that. And biology. You’re better off beating someone to death, than being beaten to death. From time immemorial, the man has guarded the entrance to the cave. Intruders are sent packing. People. Animals. A persistent intruder can’t say later that he hasn’t been warned.”

— Herman Koch

24. “For women, earrings are sort of what shaving is for men: the bigger the earrings, the more significant, the more festive, the evening.”

— Herman Koch

25. “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

26. “A reader reads a book. If it’s a good book, he forgets himself. That’s all a book has to do. When the reader can’t forget himself and keeps having to think about the writer the whole time, the book is a failure. That has nothing to do with fun. If it’s fun you’re after, buy a ticket for a roller coaster.”

— Herman Koch

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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. With perspective, I should say. A countryside of hills rolling on and on, and in the distance the glimmer of the sea.”

— Herman Koch

31. “Put a hundred writers together for a party and you get something very different – in any case, not a party.”

— Herman Koch

32. “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

33. “There have been cases of people who have gone through something horrible, but repressed it so thoroughly that they were able to lead a normal life.”

— Herman Koch

34. “Dinosaurs are not curious about who roamed the earth before they did. They live in the present. That’s something we might do well to learn from the dinosaurs.”

— Herman Koch