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Quote by Bohumil Hrabal

“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.”

Quote by Bohumil Hrabal

Work

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

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Author

Bohumil Hrabal
Bohumil Hrabal

Bohumil Hrabal was a prominent Czech writer known for his humor and satire. His works often focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people, exploring themes of humanity and social change. Hrabal's distinctive writing style has won him a wide readership. more

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“Beautiful blueberry nights fill my liver with morning and the nozzle of my heart spews forth an amalgam of blood. The sun rides the elevator up from the darkness, and the silken, waving wheat sways like a woman's raw cotton skirt. The wheels of the pit-head elevator turn backward, and columns of cherry-tree trunks girdled with white lime reveal the hidden location of military burial grounds. Watchmen guard the female convicts in their wire enclosure, and swallows deliver the message of violins in their beaks.”

“She ran her fingers over the smooth stone and then tilted her head to look up at the sky, breathing slowly, as if she could smell and taste the stars in her lungs and on her tongue. They would be cool, she imagined, and crisp before breaking sweet under her teeth, like a honeycomb cracking open to ooze out its golden-yellow syrup. Dav had liked to think of touching the stars, of one day rising to live among them, but never had they considered together how they would taste. She shut her eyes. She wished she could ask him and wondered, like she did every night, what he would think of her now.”

“I like the snow when it falls behind me, not ahead of me.” “Do you ever appreciate anything for its beauty? Or only its usefulness?” She thought of the towering Belem, the quiet of the Nyinan Forest, the sparkling stars hanging their lights in the sky. She thought of the fires, the empty cities, the slaughtered horses. “When has beauty ever fixed anything?” “It doesn’t,” Ely replied, “but it makes the broken things worthwhile.”