Quotes from Bohumil Hrabal

that the only thing on earth worthy of fear is a situation that is petrified, congealed, or dying, and the only thing worthy of joy is a situation where not only the individual but also society as a whole wages a constant battle for self-justification.

and I look on my brain as a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas, and my head as a smooth, shiny Aladdin's lamp.

I kept working and...reading The Theory of The Heavens a sentence at a time, savoring each sentence like a cough drop and brimming with a sense of the immensity, grandeur, and infinite beauty streaming at me from all sides

whichever of my friends was and is sensitive, touchy even, had to choose... emigration... and I emigrated inwardly, here to the pub for example...

the heavens are not humane, nor is any man with a head on his shoulders. Here

Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.

Which must be why Bondy the poet says that real poetry must hurt, as if you'd forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your hadkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out

Nebesa nejsou humánní, ale je asi nÄ›co víc než tato nebesa, soucit a láska, na kterou už jsem zapomenul a zapomnÄ›l.

I have calmed down a little and my work is going better than yesterday, so well, in fact, that it does itself and I can slip back into the womb of time, into my youth, when I ironed my trousers and shined my shoes, soles included, every Saturday, because when you're young you love keeping clean, you love your self-image, an image you still have time to improve.

real poetry must hurt, as if you'd forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your handkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out, [...]

I cannot live in the new time anyway, because I belong to the old time, which is dead.

For thirty-five years now I've been compacting old paper and books, living as I do in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations; living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts.

one of her eyes was lower than the other, which gave her a distinguished look, and if she seemed to squint a little, it was not because she had bad vision but because one of her eyes had simply got stuck while staring beyond the treshold of the infinite into the very center of an equilateral triangle, into the very heart of being, or, as a chatolic existentialist put it, her defective eye symbolized the diamond's eternal blemish.

Every beloved object is the center of a garden of paradise.

Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder—the starry firmament above me and the moral law within me

Thus this book is an expression not only of my own evolution, but of a part of society's evolution as well, a society I live in and that, like me, wishes to live in habitations where humor and the possibility of metaphysical escape reign supreme. BOHUMIL HRABAL, 1965

C?rÅ£ile m-au înv??at pl?cerea ÅŸi bucuria distrugerii.

I will choose my own fall, which is ascension

Why does Lao-tze say that to be born is to exit and to die is to enter?

but why was he the way he was? Why, when in fact he was a shy and timid person, was he compelled to be number one and champion of the world in eating and drinking, why was he always fleeing from us, and when unable to flee, why the awful theatrics, the showing off?

my husband can't pass by a beautiful birch tree or a beautiful spruce without just standing there, thunderstruck, watching... I'll have to be careful he doesn't merge with those trees body and soul, careful not to lose him altogether.

So I walk home like a burning house, like a burning stable, the light of life pouring out of the fire, fire pouring out of the dying wood, hostile sorrow lingering under the ashes

Trembling as usual, I dropped to one knee and, holding on to the drum with one hand, looked up, wondering what he, my boss, had against me, what made him pull such terrifying faces, faces so indignant, so full of suffering that they always made me believe that I was a repulsive person and a hopeless worker who inflicted the most ignoble blows on his noble superior.

I no longer felt alone and it gave me, not strength, but a sweet sensation of happiness, though I knew sadness was lurking not far off, because all being arises from nonbeing, and everything that exists derives from its opposite.