Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult Quotes

“Thus this book is an expression not only of my own evolution, but of a part of society’s evolution as well, a society I live in and that, like me, wishes to live in habitations where humor and the possibility of metaphysical escape reign supreme. BOHUMIL HRABAL, 1965”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“Everything has its own torture chamber, but also its own paradise.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“When they're at the bottom, people fill their eyes with beautiful things. The world is full of art, it's just a matter of knowing how to look around you and then surrendering to inexhaustible whisperings, to small details, to longing and desire.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“For the sake of love, one could plunge into the molten metal: make steel with an admixture of myself and your image within me.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“Someone pumps sentences into my brain, long-forgotten images from childhood; meaningless objects and conversations peel layers from my heart. I am again a river faun, paralyzed by longing for a river nymph. I walk through wolframic space, my mouth and nose threaded with wire, and whenever I deviate from my course, I feel a sharp pain in my jaws.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“Everyone is possessed, at times, with the desire to rebel. Man has refused to live in a primitive state of nature, which is why angels drive ambulances and gather up other angels who have been broken in half.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“From outside comes the strident clamor of slogans over a loudspeaker and an accordion optimistically paints cheap color prints. And yet there is not a single flower on the laborers' table, not one little bouquet for the world to lean on.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“Life is fidelity to the beauty exploding all around us, even, at times, at the cost of our own lives.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“Life, strangely enough, is constantly being reinvented, and loved, even though a tinfoil brain will bring forth crumpled images, and a trampled torso will ooze misery. And yet, it is still a beautiful thing when a man abandons his three square meals a day and his adding machine and his family and goes off to follow a beautiful star. Life is still magnificent as long as one maintains the illusion that an entire world can be conjured from a tiny patch of earth.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“I was in harmony with everything and I was saved, too, but lost in a way as well... but I think this will probably be my salvation...”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“This new age is melting you all down, because it's not the measles you've come down with, it's the epoch.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“You can't live without cracks in the brain. You can't rid yourself of freedom the way you'd rid yourself of lice.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“Once, for three hundred crowns, I became a saint for an instant: I bought up all the goldfinches, then released them from my hand. Oh, what a feeling when a terrified little bird flies from your palm to freedom!”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“Every era carries in its womb a child in whom one may not only place one's hopes, but through whom and with whom it would be possible to go on living.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult

“The stories in this collection represent the early results of Hrabal’s discovery of what he came to call “total realism,” the realization that the ordinary events of everyday life can be as magical as surrealism, and that straightforward accounts of people at work and in conversation can reveal more about who they are and the world they live in than attempts to portray their inner lives.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult