Bohumil Hrabal Quotes

#1. Even in my bad luck I have always been lucky.

Bohumil Hrabal

#2. Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.

Bohumil Hrabal

#3. I was always lucky in my bad luck.

Bohumil Hrabal

#4. 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

#5. Not until we're totally crushed do we show what we are made of.

Bohumil Hrabal

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. The heavens are not humane, nor is any man with a head on his shoulders. Here

Bohumil Hrabal

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.

Bohumil Hrabal

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, The highest law is love, the love that is compassion,

Bohumil Hrabal

#19. For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us. After

Bohumil Hrabal

#20. You can't rid yourself of freedom the way you'd rid yourself of lice, brother.

Bohumil Hrabal

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. ... 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

#25. The heavens may be far from humane, but I'd had about all I could take. So

Bohumil Hrabal

#26. I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.

Bohumil Hrabal

#27. To spend our days betting on three-legged horses with beautiful names

Bohumil Hrabal