Ivan Klima Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 24 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ivan Klima.
Famous Quotes By Ivan Klima
The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter ... gave rise to fresh insights. — Ivan Klima
I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying. — Ivan Klima
Rubbish is immortal, it pervades the air, swells up in water, dissolves, rots, disintegrates, changes into gas, into smoke, into soot, it travels across the world and gradually engulfs it. (...) Rubbish is like death. What else is there that is so indestructible? — Ivan Klima
A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability. — Ivan Klima
Animals have one thing that puts them way ahead of people: they don't dissemble, and you don't have to pretend in front of them. — Ivan Klima
To destroy is easier than to create, and that is why so many people are ready to demonstrate against what they reject. But what would they say if one asked them what they wanted instead? — Ivan Klima
Most people can't imagine a life that is any different from the one they are actually living. They can dream about it, they can even go into the streets and demonstrate for it, but they still can't imagine what it would be like. — Ivan Klima
Daniel felt a sudden pang of regret that something of importance was coming to an end, something so important that it was as if his very life was ending. He struggled to control his voice, while at the same time he became aware of a real pain gripping his chest. He had survived the time of oppression but not the time of freedom. — Ivan Klima
Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of. — Ivan Klima
Justice was revenge wrapping itself in a cloak of high principle. — Ivan Klima
It needs a lot of courage to admit to an action that one is ashamed of and knows to be wrong. One's reluctance to hurt someone else is just an excuse; in fact it is lack of courage. — Ivan Klima
Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death. — Ivan Klima
My father also told me that people had always suffered from being tied to the ground, from not being able to detach themselves from it. But they had dreamed of leaving it, and so they had invented the garden of paradise, which had in it everything they yearned for but lacked in their lives, and they had dreamed up creatures similar to themselves but equipped with wings. But what in the past had only been dreamed of was now beginning to materialize, my father said, pointing to the sky. Angels did not exist, but people could now fly. There was no paradise for human souls to dwell in, but one day I would understand that it was more important for people to live well and happily here on earth. — Ivan Klima
Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence. — Ivan Klima
Jerkish". That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees - and there was no doubt (...) that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and the west, it would be the language of the future. — Ivan Klima
The world is like an enormous set of scales. When evil begins to outweigh good, angels cram themselves in on the lighter side. You can't see them, but there they are, restoring the balance. — Ivan Klima
Far better that false hope should lull you,
Than that sheer blackness yawn at you — Ivan Klima
Anyone longing to become a writer, for even a few moments of his life, will vainly weave fantastic events unless he has experienced that fall during which he doesn't know where or whether it will come to an end, and unless his longing for human contact awakens in him the strength to rise, purged, from the ashes. — Ivan Klima
If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings. — Ivan Klima
Paradise is, above all, the state in which the soul feels clean. — Ivan Klima
Growing numbers of people, in their work, come into contact with a diminishing fragment of reality; as their world shrinks, so does their language. — Ivan Klima