Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass Quotes

“There are things than cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to loose their integrity in the frailty of realization.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“His unlived life worried him, tortured him, turning round and round inside him like an animal in a cage. In Dodo's body, the body of a half-wit, somebody was growing old, although he had not lived; somebody was maturing to a death that had no meaning at all.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“It is not quite as dark here as we thought. On the contrary, the interior is pulsating with light. It is, of course, the internal light of roots, a wandering phosphorescence, tiny veins of a light marbling the darkness, an evanescent shimmer of nightmarish substances. Likewise, when we sleep, severed from the world, straying into deep introversion, on a return journey into ourselves, we can see clearly through our closed eyelids, because thoughts are kindled in us by internal tapers and smolder erratically. This is how total regressions occur, retreats into self, journeys to the roots. This is how we branch out into anamnesis and are shaken by underground subcutaneous shivers. For it is only above ground, in the light of day, that we are a trembling, articulate bundle of tunes; in the depth we disintegrate again into black murmurs, confused purring, a multitude of unfinished stories.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“No one has ever charted the topography of a July night. It remains unrecorded in the geography of one's inner cosmos.

A night in July! What can be likened to it? How can one describe it? Shall I compare it to the core of an enormous black rose, covering us with the dreams of hundreds of velvety petals? The night winds blow open its fluffy center, and in its scented depth we can see the stars looking down on us.

Shall I compare it to the black firmament under our half-closed eyelids, full of scattered speckles, white poppy seeds, stars, rockets, and meteors? Or perhaps to a night train, long as the world, driving through an endless black tunnel; walking through a July night is like passing precariously from one coach to another, between sleeping passengers, along narrow drafty corridors, past stuffy compartments.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“How boundless is the horoscope of spring! One can read it in a thousand different ways, interpret it blindly, spell it out at will, happy to be able to decipher anything at all amid the misleading divinations of birds. The text can be read forward or backward, lose its sense and find it again in many versions, in a thousand alternatives. Because the text of spring is marked by hints, ellipses, lines dotted on an empty azure, and because the gaps between the syllables are filled by the frivolous guesses and surmises of birds, my story, like that text, will follow many different tracks and will be punctuated by springlike dashes, sighs, and dots.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“To this day I cannot understand how we became the conscious perpetrators of it. A strange fatality must have been driving us to it; for fate does not evade consciousness or will but engulfs them in its mechanism, so that we are able to accept, as in hypnotic trance, things that under normal circumstances would fill us with horror.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“At such a time [at dawn] I would dream of being a baker who delivers bread, a fitter from the electric company, or an insurance man collecting the weekly installments. Or at least a chimney sweep. In the morning, at dawn, I would enter some half-opened gateway, still lighted by the watchman's lantern. I would put two fingers to my hat, crack a joke, and enter the labyrinth to leave late in the evening, at the other end of the city. I would spend all day going from apartment to apartment, conducting one never-ending conversation from one end of the city to the other, divided into parts among the householders; I would ask something in one apartment and receive a reply in another, make a joke in one place and collect the fruits of laughter in the third or fourth. Among the banging of doors I would squeeze through narrow passages, through bedrooms full of furniture, I would upset chamberpots, walk into squeaking perambulators in which babies cry, pick up rattles dropped by infants. I would stop for longer than necessary in kitchens and hallways, where servant girls were tidying up. The girls, busy, would stretch their young legs, tauten their high insteps, play with their cheap shining shoes, or clack around in loose slippers.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“Nagy Sándor érzékeny volt az országok illatára. Orra megérezte a rendkívüli lehetőségeket. Azok közé tartozott, akiknek arcán álmukban Isten tenyere simított végig, így hát tudják, hogy mit nem tudnak, tele vannak feltevéssel és kétellyel, zárt szemhéjukon pedig távoli világok visszfénye szűrődik be. Mindazonáltal túlságosan is szó szerint vette az isteni allúziót. Lévén a tettek embere, vagyis lelkiekben szegény, úgy értelmezte misszióját, mint világhódító küldetést. Szívét ugyanaz a telhetetlen érzés töltötte el, mint az enyémet, keblét ugyanazok a sóhajok feszítették, látóhatárról látóhatárra, tájról tájra érve. Senki sem akadt, aki figyelmeztette volna tévedésére. Maga Arisztotelész sem értette meg őt. Noha meghódította a világot, Nagy Sándor csalódottan halt meg, kételkedve az előle örökösen eltűnő Istenben és csodáiban. Minden ország érméin és bélyegein az ő arcképe díszelgett. Büntetésül saját korának Ferenc Józsefévé vált.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass