Quotes from Bruno Schulz

The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog's soul. The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety. Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been - an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills.

To this day I cannot understand how we became the conscious perpetrators of it. A strange fatality must have been driving us to it; for fate does not evade consciousness or will but engulfs them in its mechanism, so that we are able to accept, as in hypnotic trance, things that under normal circumstances would fill us with horror.

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.

Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema?

Charles yawned out of his body, out of the depth of all its cavities the remains of yesterday. The yawning was convulsive as if his body wanted to turn itself inside out. In this way he got rid of the sand and ballast, the undigested remains of the previous day.

They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them.

I am sorry," he would say, addressing himself unexpectedly to the astonished onlooker. "I am sorry, I am concerned with that section of space which you are filling. Couldn't you move a little to one side for a minute?

But in vain did he apostrophize the insect in this new language, born of sudden inspiration, as a cockroach's understanding is not equal to such a tirade: the insect continued on its journey to a corner of the room, with movements sanctified by an ageless ritual of the cockroach world.

Das Unwirkliche ist das, was man untereinander nicht teilen kann. Was auch immer aus dieser Gemeinsamkeit herausfällt, das fällt aus dem Kreis menschlicher Angelegenheiten, geht über die Grenzen des menschlichen Theaters, über die Grenzen der Literatur hinaus.

resumiremos a nossa ambição nesta orgulhosa divisa: um ator para cada gesto

They were villages forgotten in the depth of time, peopled by creatures chained forever to their tiny destinies.

bore a hidden grudge against Mother for the ease with which she moved on past the loss of Father to daily routine. She never loved him, I thought, and because Father was not rooted in the heart of any woman, he also could not grow into any reality and floated eternally on the periphery of life, in half-real regions, on the edges of actuality.

Fascynowa?y go formy graniczne, w?tpliwe i problematyczne, jak ektoplazma somnambulików, pseudomateria, emanacja kataleptyczna mózgu, która w pewnych wypadkach rozrasta?a si? z ust u?pionego na ca?y stó?, nape?nia?a ca?y pokój, jako bujaj?ca, rzadka tkanka, astralne ciasto, na pograniczu cia?a i ducha.

My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.