Bohumil Hrabal > Quotes

“I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.”
― 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, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

“My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. 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, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, I Served the King of England

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

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

“Sometimes when I get up and emerge from the mists of slumber, my whole room hurts, my whole bedroom, the view from the window hurts, kids go to school, people go shopping, everybody knows where to go, only I don't know where I want to go, I get dressed, blearily, stumbling, hopping about to pull on my trousers, I go and shave with my electric razor - for years now, whenever I shave, I've avoided looking at myself in the mirror, I shave in the dark or round the corner, sitting on a chair in the passage, with the socket in the bathroom, I don't like looking at myself any more, I'm scared by my own face in the bathroom, I'm hurt even by my own appearance, I see yesterday's drunkenness in my eyes, I don't even have breakfast any more, or if I do, only coffee and a cigarette, I sit at the table, sometimes my hands give way under me and several times I repeat to myself, Hrabal, Hrabal, Bohumil Hrabal, you've victoried yourself away, you've reached the peak of emptiness, as my Lao Tzu taught me, I've reached the peak of emptiness and everything hurts, even the walk to the bus-stop hurts, and the whole bus hurts as well, I lower my guilty-looking eyes, I'm afraid of looking people in the eye, sometimes I cross my palms and extend my wrists, I hold out my hands so that people can arrest me and hand me over to the cops, because I feel guilty even about this once too loud a solitude which isn't loud any longer, because I'm hurt not only by the escalator which takes me down to the infernal regions below, I'm hurt even by the looks of the people travelling up, each of them has somewhere to go, while I've reached the peak of emptiness and don't know where I want to go.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka

“اغلب فکر می کنیم این که به یاد کسی هستیم منتی است بر گردن آن شخص. غافل از آن که اگر به یاد کسی هستیم این هنر اوست نه ما." به یاد ماندنی بودن" بسیار مهم تر از به یاد بودن است”
― 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 , Too Loud a Solitude

“I was always lucky in my bad luck.”
― Bohumil Hrabal I Served The King of England

“For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.” After”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

“Not until we are crushed do we know what we are made of.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

“... because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. 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

“I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know...”
― 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, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

“Even in my bad luck I have always been lucky.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Watched Trains

“ما همچون دانه هاي زيتوني هستيم كه تنها هنگامي جوهر خود را بروز مي دهيم كه در هم شكسته شويم”
― Bohumil Hrabal, تنهایی پرهیاهو

“Suddenly the door opened and in stomped a giant reeking of the river, and before anyone knew what was happening, he had grabbed a chair, smashed it in two, and chased the terrified customers into a corner. The three youngsters pressed against the wall like periwinkles in the rain, but at the very last moment, when the man had picked up half a chair in each hand and seemed ready for the kill, he burst into song, and after conducting himself in "Gray Dove Where Have You Been?" he flung aside the halves of the chair, paid the waiter for the damage, and, turning to the still-shaking customers, said, "Gentlemen I am the hangman's assistant," whereupon he left, pensive and miserable. Perhaps he was the one who, last year at the Holesovice slaughterhouse, put a knife to my neck, shoved me into a corner, took out a slip of paper, and read me a poem celebrating the beauties of the countryside at Ricany, then apologized saying he hadn't found any other way of getting people to listen to his verse.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude

“و دیدم چه غریب است که مجسمه های شخصیت های بزرگ ادبی ما مثل افلیجها بر صندلی نشسته اند، در حالی که مجسمه های روحانیون ما سرپا در حرکتند”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“نه! نه در آسمانها نشانی از رافت و عطوفت وجود دارد، نه در زندگی بالای سر و نه زیر پای ما و نه در درون من”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“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, Too Loud a Solitude