Magda Szabo Quotes

#1. The roast meat the animal had snatched was only a semblance. It was more than food, it was a meal not for human witness, a tangle of viscera, a species of human sacrifice - as if Emerence were feeding the actual person to the dog, along with all her fond memories and feelings.

Magda Szabo

#2. I was still rather young, and I hadn't thought it through, how irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal its current.

Magda Szabo

#3. Emerence was spontaneously good, unthinkingly generous, able to reveal her orphaned condition only to another orphan, but never giving voice to her utter loneliness.

Magda Szabo

#4. We looked after her. But she wanted something else, something more, I don't know what. She didn't even want the kitten, although I would have fed it too. That was the limit. Why did she never stop whining? If someone can't be helped, then they don't want help.

Magda Szabo

#5. I've been robbed once already. I won't let it happen again. It's only my cat they managed to kill twice. No-one will ever again steal my belongings, or my peace of mind.

Magda Szabo

#6. Writing isn't an easy taskmaster. Sentences left unfinished never continue as well as they had begun. New ideas bend the main arch of the text, and it never again sits perfectly true. Anyway,

Magda Szabo

#7. I know now, what I didn't then, that affection can't always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else.

Magda Szabo

#8. It was the voice of someone emerging from anesthesia, speaking with the exaggerated precision of a wondering mind striving for clarity.

Magda Szabo

#9. Creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed.

Magda Szabo

#10. When that man left her, and then the barber ran off with all the money and the few valuables she had saved up over the years, she didn't swallow caustic soda. She shook herself down as if nothing had happened

Magda Szabo

#11. She was lonely. Who isn't lonely, I'd like to know? And that includes people who do have someone but just haven't noticed.

Magda Szabo

#12. The old woman was interested only in giving, and if anyone tried to surprise her with something, she never smiled, she flew into a rage.

Magda Szabo

#13. Everything has to be done properly, even death.

Magda Szabo

#14. Not that it matters. It didn't kill me. You don't die that easily, but let me tell you, you come close to it. Afterwards, what you went through makes you so clever you wish you could become stupid again, utterly stupid.

Magda Szabo

#15. Books formed the basis of my world, my unit of measure was the printed word,

Magda Szabo

#16. didn't dare ask where she would stop the machine, and still less, why there. I didn't think she'd tell me anyway.

Magda Szabo

#17. If there's no-one to show pleasure when you come home, then it's better not to live.

Magda Szabo

#18. The simple, rational garb of terminal illness had translated her into an aristocrat. A truly great lady lay there before us, pure as the stars. It

Magda Szabo

#19. We were both wrong: she who put her faith in me, and I who thought too well of myself.

Magda Szabo

#20. She also demanded of me that, in my art, it should be real passion and not machinery that moved the branches. That was a major gift, the greatest of her bequests.

Magda Szabo

#21. In my student days, I detested Schopenhauer. Only later did I come to acknowledge the force of his idea that every relationship involving personal feeling laid one open to attack, and the more people I allowed to become close to me, the greater the number of ways in which I was vulnerable.

Magda Szabo

#22. God usually ignored us when asked for something, but he invariably granted what we feared.

Magda Szabo