Ivan Klima Quotes

#1. Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of. - Author: Ivan Klima

#2. 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? - Author: Ivan Klima

#3. Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence. - Author: Ivan Klima

#4. 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. - Author: Ivan Klima

#5. Growing numbers of people, in their work, come into contact with a diminishing fragment of reality; as their world shrinks, so does their language. - Author: Ivan Klima

#6. 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. - Author: Ivan Klima

#7. If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings. - Author: Ivan Klima

#8. There is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love. - Author: Ivan Klima

#9. Paradise is, above all, the state in which the soul feels clean. - Author: Ivan Klima

#10. 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. - Author: Ivan Klima

#11. 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. - Author: Ivan Klima

#12. Far better that false hope should lull you,
Than that sheer blackness yawn at you - Author: Ivan Klima

#13. 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? - Author: Ivan Klima

#14. 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. - Author: Ivan Klima

#15. Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour. - Author: Ivan Klima

#16. A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability. - Author: Ivan Klima

#17. If you tell anything to a woman ... it's like putting it in the papers. - Author: Ivan Klima

#18. 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. - Author: Ivan Klima

#19. Justice was revenge wrapping itself in a cloak of high principle. - Author: Ivan Klima