Bohumil Hrabal Quotes & Sayings

Until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude... — Bohumil Hrabal

I was always lucky in my bad luck. — Bohumil Hrabal

I always loved twilight: it was the only time of day I had the feeling that something important could happen. All things were more beautiful bathed in twilight, all streets, all squares, and all the people walking through them; I even had the feeling that I was a handsome young man, and I liked looking at myself in the mirror, watching myself in the shop windows as I strode along, and even when I touched my face, I felt no wrinkles at my mouth or forehead. — Bohumil Hrabal

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 — Bohumil Hrabal

Even in my bad luck I have always been lucky. — Bohumil Hrabal

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. — Bohumil Hrabal

I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop. — Bohumil Hrabal

You can't rid yourself of freedom the way you'd rid yourself of lice, brother. — Bohumil Hrabal

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

Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work. — Bohumil Hrabal

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. — Bohumil Hrabal

Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, The highest law is love, the love that is compassion, — Bohumil Hrabal

Through the station went a goods train, spitting sparks from its chimney. Viktoria stood at the window and combed those sparks out of her hair. — Bohumil Hrabal

To spend our days betting on three-legged horses with beautiful names — Bohumil Hrabal

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. — Bohumil Hrabal

I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me. — Bohumil Hrabal

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. — Bohumil Hrabal

No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out. — Bohumil Hrabal

The heavens are not humane, nor is any man with a head on his shoulders. Here — Bohumil Hrabal

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. — Bohumil Hrabal

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 — Bohumil Hrabal

If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself. — Bohumil Hrabal

The heavens may be far from humane, but I'd had about all I could take. So — Bohumil Hrabal

It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls. — Bohumil Hrabal

When I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it's amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I've been in the very heart of truth. Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, I go
home, walking the streets silently and in deep meditation, passing trams and cars and pedestrians in a cloud of books, the books I found that day and am carrying home in my briefcase — Bohumil Hrabal

And so everything I see in this world, it all moves backward and forward at the same time, like a black-smith's bellows, like everything in my press, turning into its opposite at the command of the red and green buttons, and that's what makes the world go round. — Bohumil Hrabal

For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us. After — Bohumil Hrabal

Because this week I've started in on a hundred reproductions of Rembrandt van Rijn, a hundred portraits of the old artist with the mushroom face, the face of a man pushed to the brink of eternity by art and drink, the door handle starting to turn, the final door pushed open from without by an unknown hand, and I'm beginning to have his puff-paste face, that peeling, piss-soaked wall of a face, I'm beginning to smile his half-moronic smile, to look at the world from the other side of human causes and events, and all my bales these days are framed with that portrait of Rembrandt van Rijn as an old man while I keep filling my drum with wastepaper and open books. — Bohumil Hrabal

Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of rough-hewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul. — Bohumil Hrabal

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

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. — Bohumil Hrabal

He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax ... — Bohumil Hrabal

Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know. — Bohumil Hrabal

Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, I go home — Bohumil Hrabal

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

It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence. — Bohumil Hrabal

As I helped him up, I felt him shake all over, so I asked him to forgive me, without knowing what for, but that was my lot, asking forgiveness, I even asked forgiveness of myself for being what I was, what it was my nature to be. — Bohumil Hrabal