Quotes from Bohumil Hrabal

I was in harmony with everything and I was saved, too, but lost in a way as well... but I think this will probably be my salvation...

Life, strangely enough, is constantly being reinvented, and loved, even though a tinfoil brain will bring forth crumpled images, and a trampled torso will ooze misery. And yet, it is still a beautiful thing when a man abandons his three square meals a day and his adding machine and his family and goes off to follow a beautiful star. Life is still magnificent as long as one maintains the illusion that an entire world can be conjured from a tiny patch of earth.

Life is fidelity to the beauty exploding all around us, even, at times, at the cost of our own lives.

But one never has it easy with that son of mine, one has one devil of a time." Mom was conversing and setting spoons and forks on either side of the Sevres plates "because since he was a youngster he was always, still is, elsewhere, home was hell to him, he just came in to sleep, morning to night he'd be out on Polni Street, the entire town knew him, because he was forever at somebody else's, always wanting to be somewhere other than where he was.

From outside comes the strident clamor of slogans over a loudspeaker and an accordion optimistically paints cheap color prints. And yet there is not a single flower on the laborers' table, not one little bouquet for the world to lean on.

A teardrop glittered like a diamond in the ring of her eye. When they're at the bottom, people fill their eyes with beautiful things. The world is full of art, it's just a matter of knowing how to look around you and then surrendering to inexhaustible whisperings, to small details, to longing and desire.

a man who would never bore me and who loved me in his own peculiar way, whom I would live with, and whose name I would bear.

Everything has its own torture chamber, but also its own paradise.

Everyone is possessed, at times, with the desire to rebel. Man has refused to live in a primitive state of nature, which is why angels drive ambulances and gather up other angels who have been broken in half.

Someone pumps sentences into my brain, long-forgotten images from childhood; meaningless objects and conversations peel layers from my heart. I am again a river faun, paralyzed by longing for a river nymph. I walk through wolframic space, my mouth and nose threaded with wire, and whenever I deviate from my course, I feel a sharp pain in my jaws.

For the sake of love, one could plunge into the molten metal: make steel with an admixture of myself and your image within me.

Ach panenkomarjá, ten život je stejnÄ› k zeÅ¡ílení krásnej. Ne že by byl, ale já to tak vidím.

Not until we're totally crushed do we show what we are made of.

soy culto a pesar de mí mismo y ya no sé qué ideas son mías, surgidas propiamente de mí, y cuáles he adquirido leyendo...

cuando leo, de hecho no leo, sino que tomo una frase bella en el pico y la chupo como un caramelo, la sorbo como una copita de licor, la saboreo hasta que, como el alcohol, se disuelve en mí, la saboreo durante tanto tiempo que acaba no sólo penetrando mi cerebro y mi corazón, sino que circula por mis venas hasta las raíces mismas de los vasos sanguíneos.

los verdaderos pensamientos provienen del exterior, (...) por eso todos los inquisidores del mundo queman los libros en vano, porque cuando un libro comunica algo válido, su ritmo silencioso persiste incluso mientras lo devoran las llamas, y es que un verdadero libro siempre indica algún camino nuevo que conduce más allá de sí mismo.

Yo soy al mismo tiempo el artista y el único espectador, y por eso cada día termino rendido y muerto de cansancio, agotado y trastornado

con un libro en la mano abro mis atemorizados ojos a un mundo extraño, distinto de aquel en el que me hallaba hace apenas un instante porque yo, cuando me sumerjo en la lectura, estoy en otra parte, dentro del texto, me despierto sorprendido y reconozco con culpa que efectivamente vuelvo de un sueño, del más bello de los mundos, del corazón mismo de la verdad.

yo puedo permitirme el lujo de abandonarme porque nunca estoy abandonado, estoy solo para poder vivir en una soledad poblada de pensamientos...

jsem džbán plný živé a mrtvé vody

Camino pensado en la melancolía de este mundo que no se acaba de construir jamás.

De esta manera, a pesar de mi mismo, me he vuelto sabio...

Omul care se dedic? ideilor nu este uman.

and, oddly enough, playing with his baby seems to renew his strength, though not so much the strength in his arms as the strength in his soul.