Nocturnal Apparitions Quotes

“Suddenly the world began to wither and blacken, rapidly secreting from itself a hallucinatory dusk that infected all things. The plague of dusk expanded venomously and insidiously in all directions, creeping from one thing to another; whatever it touched at once decayed, blackened and disintegrated into rot. People fled from the dusk in silent panic, but the leprosy soon caught up with them, smearing a dark rash across their foreheads. They lost their faces, which fell away in great, shapeless stains, and so they went on, without features, without eyes, dropping mask after mask along the way, until the dusk teemed with those abandoned larvae, scattered behind them.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“Now it is time for me to return to the furnace from which I came, botched and misshapen. I go to atone for the error of the Demiurge who created me.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“Undula, Undula, o sigh of the soul for the land of the happy and perfect! How my soul expanded in that light, when I stood, a humble Lazarus, at your bright threshold. Through you, in a feverish shiver, I came to know my own misery and ugliness in the light of your perfection.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“The winter night began to wall itself in with black bricks of nothingness. Infinite expanses condensed into deaf, blind rock: a heavy, impenetrable mass growing into the space between things. The world congealed into nothingness.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“By breaking his death up into instalments, Father was accustoming us to the idea of his departure.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“He was a dog, without a shadow of a doubt. But in human form. The quality of doggishness is an inner quality and can manifest itself just as easily in human as in animal form... He was more likely a bookbinder, a tub-thumber, a rabble-rouser, or a party member: a violent man of dark, explosive passions. There, in the depths of his fervour, in the convulsive bristling of all his fibres, in this frenzied fury, barking wildly at the end of the stick I was pointing at him, he was one hundred per cent dog”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“Emil, the oldest of my cousins, with his bright blond moustache and a face that life seemed to have wiped clean of any expression [...]

His face, withered and clouded, seemed day by day to be forgetting itself, turning into an empty white wall covered with a pale network of veins, in which the dwindling memories of a tumultuous and wasted life intertwined like the lines on a faded map... With his eyes wandering over distant memories, he told strange anecdotes, which always broke off abruptly, disintegrating and dissipating into nothingness [...]

His face was the mere breath of a face–a streak that some unkonwn passer-by had left behind in the air.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“There was something tragic in that sloppy and immoderate fertility: the misery of a creature struggling on the border of nothingness and death; the strange heroism of a femininity triumphant in its fecundity over the deformity of nature and the insufficiency of man. Yet her progeny revealed the cause of that maternal panic, that frenzy of birthing that had exhausted itself in abortive foetuses and an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or faces.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“After a brief moment of splendour, the whole enterprise too a sad turn.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories