To spend our days betting on three-legged horses with beautiful names
BOHUMIL HRABALEleanor Roosevelt doesn’t ever do anything that is going to hurt her husband. She tries things out on him. She gets permission to do things.
More Bohumil Hrabal Quotes
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It’s interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.
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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.
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I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.
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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.
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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 roughhewn wood like a child’s laugh.
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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.
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He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax.
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I expect them to tell me things about myself I don’t know.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.
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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.
BOHUMIL HRABAL