All My Cats Quotes

“Somehow I had reached an age when being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because I was now bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the way girls used to love me when I was young.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“All I ever learned was that, having reached that limit, another horizon would open up, and that I had to keep on driving myself, escaping toward a horizon line that was forever receding, until today, here, as I walked beside the frozen river, the entire horizon turned back and came at me from all sides and its lines passed through me, creating a central point that did not impinge on me but rather came back to my hands and feet like a boomerang.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“I no longer felt alone and it gave me, not strength, but a sweet sensation of happiness, though I knew sadness was lurking not far off, because all being arises from nonbeing, and everything that exists derives from its opposite.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“one cannot even kill a cat, let alone a person, with impunity, nor can one with impunity expel a person, let alone drive away a cat, without consequences.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“I knew my own mind and I knew that everything that slowed me down would also propel me forward, so I just sat there. [W]e were constantly being slowed down and propelled forward at the same time, thus ending up in a time that was ours alone, a time that was in fact mine and mine alone.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“I moved through the world like a team of runaway horses in the hands of an obsessed and demented driver. But I was already somewhere else. I bowed down not just to the trees, [...] but I bowed down as well to those three tomcats, I bowed to myself in the mirror, and smiled because I no longer feared myself. I felt as though I were wearing a bridle and being led, no matter how or where, and it was a wonderful feeling, that everything was being prepared for me, as for a bridegroom or for bridesmaids, or for young men in a funeral procession. I no longer felt alone and it gave me, not strength, but a sweet sensation of happiness, though I knew sadness was lurking not far off, because all being arises from nonbeing, and everything that exists derives from its opposite.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“I have a habit, before leaving my flat in Prague, of checking three times to make sure I’ve shut off the gas stove, that I’ve turned off the lights in the bathroom and the water closet, and that I’ve locked the door, and then I go back once more to check on everything a fourth time, and so now, though I knew that nothing but my swan could possibly be lying there under the snow, I still brushed the snow away with trembling hands and saw the curve of her wing, and I went on brushing the snow away and yes, there was her neck, then I elbowed my way back like a sloth, and now nothing ached anymore but my heart, and so I crawled back from the riverbank to the swan again, and then again, trying to brush away more and more snow from that beautiful snowbound creature who, perhaps for my sake alone, had arranged herself in my sight so that I cried out into the dark morning and realized, bitterly, that the king of Czech comedians could go to claim his advance for this story, not to the Writers’ Publishing House, but to the very center, not of death, but of hell itself, where I will suffer pangs of guilt and remorse and shame that will pursue me into eternity, into the very heart of incalculable consequences.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“He could not turn back the clock a second, nor could he ever push it forward a second, so that what happened had to happen.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“In the end, when I could no longer hope or believe, when I was already a wreck, why did you take me back, a body without a soul, without love?”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats