Quotes from Bruno Schulz

Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.

Was he happy? One would ask that question in vain. A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities, so that the actual truth can be contrasted with partly real probabilities and reflect itself in them.

The crowd laughs at the parody. Weep, ladies, over your own fate, when you see the misery of imprisoned matter, of tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is, nor where the gesture may lead that has been imposed on it forever. The crowd laughs. Do you understand the terrible sadism, the exhilarating, demiurgical cruelty of that laughter? Yet we should weep, ladies, at our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong had been committed.

On that night the sky laid bare its internal construction in many sections which, like quasi-anatomical exhibits, showed the spirals and whorls of light, the pale-green solids of darkness, the plasma of space, the tissue of dreams.

The room was dark and velvety from the royal blue wallpaper with its gold pattern, but even here the echo of the flaming day shimmered brassily on the picture frames, on doorknobs and glided borders, although it came through the filter of the dense greenery of the garden.

I did not have enough courage to go round to the back of the villa. I should certainly have been noticed by someone. Why in spite of this, did I have the feeling of having been there already–a long time ago? Don't we infact know in advance all the landscapes we see in our life? Can anything occur that is entirely new, that in depths of our being, we have not anticipated for a long time?

I harbored in my mind a sort of utopia about 'an age of genius' that supposedly existed in my life once upon a time, not in any calendar year but on a level above chronology, an age when everything blazed with godly colors and one took in the whole sky with a single breath, like a gulp of pure ultramarine.

Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence which have ceased to be amusing. In the interests of an important and fascinating experiment, it can even become meritorious. Here is the starting point of a new apologia for sadism.

For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.

There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are double, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.

The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.

The cashier had long since left for home. By now she was probably bustling by an unmade bed that was waiting in her small room like a boat to carry her off to the black lagoons of sleep, into the complicated world of dreams. The person sitting in the box office was only a wraith, an illusory phantom looking with tired, heavily made-up eyes at the empyiness of light, fluttering her lashes thoughtlessly to disperse the golden dust of drowsiness scattered by the elctric bulbs.

For us old-age pensioners, autumn is on the whole a dangerous season. He who knows how difficult it is for us to achieve any stability at all, how difficult it is to avoid distraction or destruction by one's own hand, will understant tha autumn, its winds, disturbances, and atmospheric confusions, does not favour our existence, which is precarious anyway.

It was difficult to anticipate—in these monsters with enormous, fantastic beaks which they opened wide immediately after birth, hissing greedily to show the backs of their throats, in these lizards with frail, naked bodies of hunchbacks—the future peacocks, pheasants, grouse or condors. Placed in cotton wool, in baskets, this dragon brood lifted blind, walleyed heads on thin necks, croaking voicelessly from their dumb throats.

One imagined these barrel organs, beautifully painted, carried on the backs of little grey old men, whose indistinct faces, corroded by life, seemed covered by cobwebs – faces with watery, immobile eyes slowly leaking away, emaciated faces as discoloured and innocent as the cracked and weathered bark of trees, and now like bark smelling only of rain and sky.

Stupida, facilona primavera! Ricopre tutto senza discernimento, confonde il senso con il nonsenso, eternamente buffona, finta tonta, di una leggerezza senza limiti.

If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say 'Less matter, more form!

Beds unmade for days on end, piled high with bedding crumpled and disordered from the weight of dreams, stood like deep boats waiting to sail into the dank and confusing labyrinths of some dark starless Venice.

Matter is the most passive and most defenseless essence in cosmos. Anyone can mold it and shape it; it obeys everybody. All attempts at organizing matter are transient and temporary, easy to reverse and to dissolve. There is no evil in reducing life to other and newer forms. Homicide is not a sin.

Ulica Krokodyli by?a koncesj? naszego miasta na rzecz nowoczesno?ci i zepsucia wielkomiejskiego. Widocznie nie sta? nas by?o na nic innego, jak na papierow? imitacj?, jak na fotomonta? z?o?ony z wycinków zle?a?ych, zesz?orocznych gazet.

During the period of the shortest, sleepy days of winter that are demarcated from morning and evening on both sides by furry edges of twilight, when the city branches out ever more deeply into the labyrinths of the winter nights and is summoned back by a brief dawn to reflection, to a return home, my father was already lost, sold, sworn to that other sphere.

A piactéren álló ház els? emeleti lakásán nap mint nap végigvonult az egész hatalmas nyár: rezg? léglombikok csöndje, forró álmukat alvó fényes négyszögek a padlón; a nappal tárházának legmélyéb?l kiszabadult verklidallam; egy zongorarefrén újra meg újra felhangzó két-három taktusa napfénybe ájultan a fehér kövezeten, a nappal mélyének tüzébe veszve.

A valóság lényege az értelem. Aminek nincs értelme, az számunkra nem valóságos. A valóság minden darabja azáltal létezik, hogy részese valamiféle egyetemes értelemnek. A régi kozmogóniák ezt azzal a szentenciával fejezték ki, hogy "Kezdetben vala az Ige". Aminek nincs neve, az számunkra nem létezik. Valamit megnevezni annyit tesz, mint egyféle egyetemes értelem részévé tenni.

Sada se ?esto glasno i cvrkutavo smejao, prosto se zanosio od smeha, ili je kucao u krevet i sam sebi odgovarao "molim" u raznim intonacijama, po ?itave sate.